Scattered Ashes
by Deionarra
Summary: COMPLETE. An alternate ending to Soul Reaver I: prophecies, revelations, and the end of an age...
1. Prologue: Falcon Without a Falconer

Foreword: Much as I love Raziel, Kain, and the rest of the characters you find in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, I own neither them nor any rights to them. This means they aren't copyright under my name and they aren't my sex slaves either. Much sadness on both counts.   
  
*coughcough* Anyway! Enjoy the story.  
  
Scattered Ashes  
  
So many ashes are scattered  
  
So many rivers run dry  
  
Sometimes your Heaven is Hell  
  
and you don't know why  
  
Where do fallen angels go  
  
I just don't know  
  
Where do fallen angels go  
  
They just keep falling, falling, falling...  
  
-Aerosmith: Fallen Angels  
  
Outside the walls of his courtroom, Turel heard clashing metal and the screams of the dying. He was clan leader, the second son of Lord Kain, and he would not fall to the chaos that ravaged his children. But that thought held little comfort. The bolted doors to the chamber crashed and shuddered as bodies slammed against it. The doors would hold, though. The invaders were too fargone in their madness to tear them down.  
  
At the side of Turel's throne, a muscular and weasel-eyed vampire stood and waited. Faithful Lenath. Turel's son and second-in-command had not faltered since the first days of the crumbling. But the clan leader knew that Lenath's calm was little more than a patient acceptance of death. Turel smiled to himself proudly. Had fortune been kinder, Lenath could have ruled Nosgoth at his side. It was a duty that Kain no longer honored.  
  
Kain. Turel remembered the day the smokestack had been taken and the plea he raised to his father. The master had come, but not to help.  
  
The secondbornn shifted his weight on the throne and immediately winced. He had forgotten that his body was all but broken. Only for the moment, of course; to forget it would be to forget the madness that consumed his territory like plague, the literal rivers of blood that stained his once-glorious city. It had happened so quickly...  
  
The doors boomed in their frames. "Lord Turel!" cried a voice from the outside.  
  
Lenath's red eyes widened but he did not stir otherwise. That was the voice of Behuela, Turel noted wearily. A mere messenger.  
  
"Lord Turel!" she called again. "They have gone, but we cannot hold. You must let us in!"  
  
Silence. Turel heard a faint warning cry from behind the door.  
  
"My lord! They return! We cannot hold them back!" By now her voice was hoarse with panic. Metal clashed on metal, someone bellowed a war cry, and above that a half-feral voice laughed in mockery. Within seconds a chorus of shouts and dying screams rose behind the door.  
  
"I am sorry..." Turel whispered.  
  
The door thudded dully but barely shook. Above the cacophony, he heard Beheula in a scream high and pained.  
  
"FAAATHEEEEERRR!"  
  
"...child..."  
  
Something cracked, ragged and wet, and the half-feral voice laughed as if he would never stop. Turel's huge, bat-like ears caught every note.  
  
He sighed and slumped back into his throne. To end like this... only Dumah's first demise could be more shameful. His younger brother, powerful warrior as he was, had been overtaken by a mob of desperate humans. It was even worse than what had happened to Raziel's clan.  
  
Turel started from his thoughts. "Lenath."  
  
The vampire immediately knelt. "My lord."  
  
"Is the sun rising?"  
  
Lenath walked to the stained glass window behind the throne and nonchalantly shattered it. "Not for another hour or so, my lord," he said after a moment.  
  
Turel tapped his brittle talons on the throne's side. How many dawns?... six, perhaps five. But no more than six had passed. That would leave two more, three if he had miscounted. If he had counted correctly, the second dawn would be his last. That day, the Angel of Death would deliver him in the guise of his elder brother.  
  
Kain had said so. And the master had never been wrong. 


	2. Chapter One: Good News

1- Good News  
  
  
  
Katalina eyed the tomato plant critically. It had not been the best of seasons, true, but the leaves shouldn't have been quite so yellow. Perhaps it would have a better chance of thriving near the glyph-globe. She dipped her fingers into the dirt around the stalk and began poking for the roots.   
  
"Proving troublesome?" someone said behind her. Katalina smiled to herself. She hadn't even heard him land.  
  
"Raziel!" she greeted warmly as she turned. Raziel stood behind a stunted peach bush and his eyes were less glaring than usual. "So good to see you again!"  
  
"And I you, Katalina," Raziel returned. He loped past the peach bush to stand next to herand Katalina ran her eyes over her friend. He seemed none the worse for wear- face-cloth a little more scuffed than it had been, but other than that he hadn't changed at all, down to the last tear in his wings and the last missing body part.  
  
"But yes... the tomato plant *is* proving a bit stubborn," she said with a smile. "How has the world been treating you?"  
  
Raziel stooped and unceremoniously ripped the plant out of the ground with his talons. "Better than has been its recent habit," he said as he handed her the ragged mess. "Kain is dead."  
  
Katalina looked up from her mournful examination of the plant. "What?"  
  
"Kain is dead," he repeated. She noticed his wings unfurling proudly behind his back. "I killed the murderer with his own blade."   
  
She stared.  
  
Raziel's eyes flared toward the smoke-obscured sky. "His blighted age is over."  
  
Katalina felt a laugh-sob struggling somewhere inside her. "Raziel." Slowly she hugged him and the tomato plant, which she was still holding, slapped lightly against his back. "You've saved us!"  
  
He touched his claws to her back. Strange to think he had not embraced someone for centuries. "The remaining vampires will not so quickly consign themselves to defeat," Raziel said as he pulled away. "There is yet much conflict ahead for your city."  
  
"But you have killed Kain! Now there is reason to hope! Without the vampires, we could tear down the smoke towers... rebuild the forests... we could take back all that is ours!"  
  
Raziel raised his hairless eyebrows. "Your plans are quite grand, Katalina," he said lightly. "I hope you do not intend to oversee it all."  
  
She smiled sheepishly. "Oh, no. I meant... it will take time. Vampires aren't ones to commit mass suicide when things turn dark. But... truly, the world has changed!"  
  
"The end of an age," Raziel agreed.  
  
"Yes! And... it won't belong to the vampires." Katalina eyed the rows of plants she had struggled to nurture in the near-sunless skies. "We could even grow a decent crop for once."  
  
Raziel laughed. "That having been mentioned," he said, "what did you intend to do with that?"  
  
Katalina eyed the uprooted plant in her hand. "Oh, right. See how sickly it looks?"  
  
Raziel looked at the wilting leaves. "They seem to have color."  
  
"The wrong color. Healthy plants are green, like such," she said, indicating one of the heartier plants. "Yellow leaves mean the plant is sick. Brown leaves mean it is dead."  
  
"Ah," he said dubiously.  
  
"So this needs to be moved closer to the glyph globe. Take that one too, if you'd be so kind." She watched as Raziel ripped the plant out of the ground and, in the process, tore it in two. "Ah... actually, just leave it."  
  
"What will you do next?" he asked as he walked beside her.  
  
"I suppose I'd tell everyone the good news," Katalina said. "And they'll probably want to celebrate. Bonfires, dancing, the best wine..." She cast him a sidelong glance. "We'd be honored to have you."  
  
"Honored, perhaps, but not pleased," he said quietly.  
  
Katalina looked at him sharply, but Raziel was right and she knew it. Despite the fact that he had never harmed anyone in the human city, not everyone perceived him as a trustworthy ally. Perhaps it was his vaguely demonic features. Perhaps it was his unfortunate habit of sipping at human souls when he was wounded. Whatever the reason, the humans were content to worship their messiah from a distance.  
  
That had been the thing that compelled Katalina to strike up a friendship with the unusual creature. She had been picking peaches as he loped by. When she looked up, she saw the humans near him exchange uncomfortable glances and shy away. Then his burning eyes locked with hers and without thinking, she had offered him a peach.  
  
It did him good to concentrate on something other than revenge. He must have thought so, too, or he would never waste so much time helping her tend the fields... as much as his talons could, anyway. At the very least, she was someone to talk to who wasn't trying to kill or manipulate him. It was an oddity in his world.  
  
"What are you doing next?" Katalina asked as she dug a hole for the uprooted plant.   
  
"Delivering the good news to my oldest brother." She had to suppress a shudder at the wicked coldness in his voice.  
  
"I didn't know there were any left."  
  
"There is but one." His claws twitched at his side.  
  
"And after that?"  
  
There was a long silence. Katalina looked up to see him staring into the distance.  
  
"Raziel?"  
  
He looked down to where she was stooping. "It is your age," he said simply, "not mine."  
  
"And that means what?"  
  
"Have you humans no art for subtlety?"  
  
"Heyyy."  
  
Katalina stood and looked up at the glyph globe suspended above the relocated plant. The mystics had created the globe with the old magic, most of whose intricacies were forgotten. But even this crude creation hummed with power. It was nothing more than a sphere of glass tinted light blue, and within the globe a glowing symbol rotated in a quick blur. She figured it had to be the glyph for sunlight. The glyph globes allowed her people to grow crops under the sunless skies of Nosgoth. Of course, they were nothing like the real thing, which had not been seen for centuries.   
  
"-even now," Raziel was saying.  
  
"What?"  
  
"To think that after hearing of the tyrant's downfall, you go back to your dirt and planting."  
  
"Ah, Raziel," she said, wiping her hands on her shirt, "you don't know what it is to live in this city. There isn't another speck of green for at least fifteen miles. My children will be overjoyed, no doubt. No more trotting off to find another vampire head to gloat about. And we could see what the leeches did with their 'civilization.'" She grimaced. "But I'm not so certain whether their cities would be worth taking back."  
  
"The stench isn't *that* unpleasant."  
  
Katalina chuckled. "Of course, Raziel, of course."  
  
He had turned toward the north, where the sky seemed to lighten as if with false dawn. She followed his intent gaze.  
  
"One of the smokestacks to the north fell," Katalina explained.  
  
It was as if she had pointed and said, "Your brother is that way." Raziel's body tensed, blue muscles rigid against white bones, and his eyes... they blistered with hatred.   
  
"I know," he said.  
  
Katalina stepped back despite herself. His whole being radiated hunger.  
  
But the moment passed. Raziel turned back to her and the half-mad beast inside him lay buried once more.  
  
Quite a moody one, she thought to herself.  
  
"Your company is pleasant as always, Katalina," he said.  
  
"And you're a busy man," she said with a sad smile.  
  
"And you have a celebration to organize."  
  
Pause.  
  
"Be safe, Raziel," Katalina said.  
  
"And you," he replied. "And your tomatoes."  
  
They waved in farewell and Raziel hurried northward with his long, loping stride. Katalina watched him fade into a blue spot in the distance.  
  
It would be the last she'd see of him in her lifetime. 


	3. Chapter Two: Madness

2- Madness  
The reaver of souls ignored the sound of footsteps shying away. He knew that his visage was hideous, that to the humans around him he was far from an angelic saint. For now, it didn't bother him. He had too much to do.  
  
Raziel loped down the path, which was little more than a deep rut carved into the earth next to Katalina's land. The acres next to the city walls were mostly farmlands, he had discovered, and they looked the same on this afternoon as they had on any other: scraggly patches of jungle blending into the distance and illuminated by rows of glyph globes.  
  
It was an interesting existence, living off the wreckage of a despoiled land. As a vampire, he had fed the same way off a dwindling race. The only difference was that the humans' food had no will to survive or fight back. No wonder Katalina devoted nearly all her time to the care of her crops.  
  
Raziel smiled inwardly. The middle-aged woman treated him as if he were one of her plants, something that needed to be weeded and moved closer to the glyph globe. It didn't seem to matter that he was several centuries her senior. He couldn't fathom the relief he felt at seeing his claws covered in something other than blood, but whatever it was, it drew him back to the human city when the hunt could wait a few more hours. Katalina was always glad to see him, and that he could understand; he too had lost children.  
  
With a grunt of effort, Raziel leaped up, grabbed the edge of a stone landing, and sprang lightly on top of it. The stairs lay a few yards off, but eh... too much effort. The landing tapered off into a winding set of stairs that wound to the top of the city's outer wall, but he was feeling lazy. Raziel planted his claws into the wall with a satisfying *shink* and prowled up the wall like a four-legged spider.  
  
The soul reaver stood at last at the human city's northern boundary. Away to the north, range after range of frozen mountains clawed at the sky. Mist spilled between the peaks, and in some valleys the faint wisps of clouds trailed and promised snow. Though it was mid-afternoon, the sky to the northeast was lighter than it was to the west. There, what remained of the great smokestack lay like a broken stick someone had planted upright in the snow. Black smoke still seeped from the tower's ruins, but it was like sap oozing from a fallen branch: weak, impotent.  
  
Raziel strode along the wall's pathway, ignoring the human guard that stared after him. So he had left a series of three-hold marks on the inside of the wall... let them paint murals if it so offended their sense of aesthetics. The beast that Katalina had glimpsed inside him raced through his limbs and he could not have resisted if he wanted to.  
  
The waters of the Abyss had burned so savagely...  
  
...and Turel had thrown him in. Turel, his oldest brother, still younger than he. Turel, who had grasped his left shoulder and dragged him to the edge of the Abyss.  
  
The soul reaver spread his ruined wings and let the wind carry him toward the smokestack. His claws curled at his side.  
  
Turel, the last to die at his hand.  
********************************************************  
  
Hours later, Raziel stood on a small ridge built into the side of a mountain, glaring down at the petrified forest he could barely see in the darkness. He had loped through the landscape tirelessly, had let the hatred of centuries blaze through him- and he had traveled in a circle.  
  
The soul reaver hopped off the ridge and continued walking with a frustrated sigh. There were always obstacles, he thought resignedly. If it wasn't getting lost, it was heaving around chunks of rock. So perhaps he should be thankful.  
  
Raziel tilted his head. Had there been...?  
  
The voices echoed again, and this time his ears placed them in the midst of the petrified forest. There had indeed.  
  
He stepped cautiously into the wasteland and dropped to a crouch. If he was lucky, the voices belonged to humans. If he was luckier still, they would know the way to the smokestack.   
  
He glanced toward the sky and idly wondered if his lucky stars were shining tonight.  
  
The voices drew nearer until Raziel could make out their forms in the darkness. They were Turelim vampires, he realized at last, about six of them, trudging across the landscape and muttering darkly to each other.  
  
"We should not have left," one of them growled above the others.  
  
A Turelim near the front of the group turned, obviously in ill temper. "No, Klaean," it snapped, "we should have stayed and gone mad."  
  
Klaean snorted. "At least then, Lord Turel would stand beside us."  
  
The other sneered. "Lord Turel..." it hissed with contempt.  
  
It was cut short as another vampire slashed the first across the face. "You will not speak of our father in that tone," the aggressor said flatly.  
  
The wounded vampire slowly wiped blood from its face. "And you," it said in a measured voice, red eyes flaring, "will not strike at your betters again." Its arm lashed out like a loaded spring and the other Turelim fell soundlessly, except for the rain-like patter of blood against the fossilized tree trunks.   
  
"That was unnecessary," Klaean commented after a pause.  
  
"Don't tell me," the vampire answered with a laugh, "that you have not felt starved for blood these past days."  
  
"No," Klaean admitted as it stooped next to the corpse.  
  
Raziel turned in disgust as the cannibals went to work. In the days of the empire's glory, no vampire would fall to such depths, much less a pack of them. The thought that these were the progeny of his brother nearly made him ill. Kain was right; the age of Nosgoth's vampires was over.  
  
"I smell something," one of the Turelim said suddenly.  
  
Raziel froze.  
  
The sound of their feasting stopped and the petrified forest lay silent. Along his right arm, Raziel felt the Soul Reaver, his wraith blade, coiling down his arm in anticipation of battle. Five against one, he thought fiercely, letting his claws burrow into the earth. It would be a short battle.  
  
Raziel's muscles tensed but before he could lunge into the open, Soul Reaver swinging, the tense silence broke at the sound of a wordless howl. One of the Turelim gasped and Raziel found it hard not to; the howl came from a humanoid throat but surely not from a sound mind, and the speaker was not far off. A chorus of raucous laughter burst from the same source and drew nearer. Raziel heard the Turelim immediately spring away from the corpse.  
  
"They followed us?"  
  
"How many?"  
  
"Less than five..."  
  
They had no time before a volley of telekinetic projectiles slammed into the midst of the group. One hit the dead body and it flew spiralling into the air. The Turelim responded with a volley of their own. Stone-like trees exploded in black splinters and something shrieked in the dark.  
  
Raziel did not recognize the red-eyed creatures that spilled from the night. No, he realized, he did: they had once been Turelim. One had sprouted two horns from its chest and patches of blue fur randomly covered its body. Another had ears that stretched four feet to either side of its head, and bones had sprouted along their topsides that made them resemble wings. Yet another was completely covered with blue fur and no ears, but it did have a glowing red eye in the middle of its abdomen. The three monsters lunged into the true Turelim like rabid wolves.  
  
Raziel watched as the battled flared into chaos. The first abomination charged into Klaean and impaled its enemy with the horns growing from its chest. Then, with a high-pitched laugh, it tore out its own throat.   
  
Two Turelim charged at the half-winged creature. Its ear-wings rose up, flared with white light, and then it flapped its wings down forcefully. The white light jumped from its ears to the Turelim, who stumbled as they ran. Their arms grasped at the air as if they were drowning.  
  
Then they began to decay.  
  
Their flesh blackened, crumbled, rotted away in seconds. One opened its mouth to scream, and as its mouth opened its cheeks vanished as if burned away by acid, its tongue curled like parchment and turned to dust, its eyes fell backward into its skull and disappeared. Both Turelim hit the ground as skeletons that looked several centuries dead.  
  
The last Turelim climbed out from beneath two corpses, one the mutilated corpse of its comrade and the other the third abomination, its stomach-eye ripped into glowing red strands. Before the Turelim could gain its feet, however, the half-winged creature was upon it. Its left wing lashed out, tearing spine and shoulder tendons, its right wing caught beneath the shoulder blade and wrenched it free, and its claws plunged into its opponent's neck and yanked in a flurry of red pulp.The headless body fell, followed by a second, lighter thump.  
  
"Pretty," the creature crooned. Raziel watched in disbelief as it leaned down and drew the Turelim's intestines out of its corpse like thread. When a sizable amount was free, the creature wrapped them around its shoulders as if they made up a shawl. "And it would be such a pretty thing for Latis, isn't it dear? Oh yes!" it piped in a high-pitched voice in answer to itself. "Such a pretty thing, she'd like it so! / Wouldn't she now? You do know how she tends to the extravagant... / We could say it cost so much, so very much..." The creature looked slyly at the dead bodies all around it. "...that they're still working to pay for it!" It tittered to itself in satisfaction. "So clever you are! Latis wouldn't think..." It paused. "Hmmmmm? Latis is dead? / Yes! Look! There she is. / Hmmmmm."   
  
It tapped one bloody claw against its lip, studying one of the depraved creatures contemplatively.   
  
"Oh, but she'd like it," it whined to itself. It eyed the intestines in its claws mournfully. "Maybe, maybe... ifffff..." It grabbed the stomach-eyed corpse and began to laboriously wind its grotesque gift around and around the body as if they were bandages. At the end of the coil, the creature tugged irritably and the strange rope snapped free of its corpse.  
  
"There," it murmured to itself contentedly. "I told you she'd look pretty in it, didn't I? / Yes, yes you did, and she does look so wonderful... so wonderful..." It sighed. "Oohhh Latis, there are stars that would fall from the heavens to give light for you! Staaaarrrs, shiiiiining so briiiiight..." It began to dance with the corpse as if they were in a ballroom.  
  
Raziel had had enough. He rose and stepped toward the dancing creature, the Soul Reaver tingling with the proximity of spilled blood. "Your 'Latis' is dead, creature," he said softly. "I can help you follow her."   
  
It stopped and let go of the corpse, which fell to the ground wetly. "What's this, what's this?" it asked itself, tilting its head in question.  
  
Raziel swung the Soul Reaver in answer.   
  
The creature dodged surprisingly quickly, but the wraith blade slashed through its left ear. "Ayyyyah!" it screamed. "It nips, it nips!"   
  
Again Raziel made no answer but pressed in with a vicious jab. The abomination ducked and scuttled to the side.   
  
"How impolite," it hissed. "I don't like it at all. / Nor I!" It leapt toward him in a flash of blinding speed. He had time only to raise the Reaver before it slammed him into the ground, its talons sunken into his shoulders.  
  
Raziel grunted with pain and stabbed at the creature wildly. Its wings slashed a bloody line across his leg, scraping against the bone. His own claws burst through the tender flesh of its ear-wings and peeled the membrane away. It screamed again and jerked its claws, hurling him into something hard that bashed against his exposed spine. The word 'tree' throbbed dully in his mind. The creature whirled to face him, both ear-wings hanging in tatters, almost like his own.   
  
Tree... wood... fire...  
  
Raziel forced his battered body into the summoning position. The pain nearly drove him into the spectral world. His reeling mind torturously rose, reached out-  
  
The creature leapt just as the flame glyph flickered and exploded. The ancient trees flared orange and the creature screaming, hurtling through the air, suddenly on fire. Raziel barely managed to roll aside and the burning creature crashed into the tree he had slammed into moments before. Something cracked (was it the tree or the creature?) and the abomination fell, writhing, screaming. All its muscles clenched at once, and then it collapsed, its burning limbs falling without resistance to the scorched ground.  
  
With an effort, Raziel reached up to the cowl that covered his face. His talons fumbled uselessly until they found the edge of the fabric, pulled it away enough to reveal his fangs, the empty place where his lower jaw had been burned away. He closed his eyes and called the creature's liberated soul to him... it came, and he drank it welcomingly. The pain faded into a distant memory.  
  
The soul reaver replaced the cloth and gazed almostly contemplatively at the chaotic scene that lay before him. Those creatures... what had happened to Turelim's clan that would lead to the creation of such utterly corrupted beings? What had the still-sane Turelim been fleeing? He would not get his answers from the slowly disintegrating corpses.   
  
And yet, Raziel reminded himself as he resumed his trek through the petrified forest, he had learned one important fact from the slain vampires: Turel was still alive, and he remained with his clan, whether he had turned into a depraved lunatic or not. 


	4. Chapter Three: Forbidden Truths

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*   
  
To Ruff_Collie, Ash, MB, Karre, Sarryn, AmuseMe, Dave, and Raven-Marss2000: you all rock! Thanks so much for your reviews. It means a lot to me. :D  
  
To everyone else, please feel free to leave your feedback, whether positive or negative. It's great just knowing that people are reading the story, and even greater if they can give me tips on how to improve it. So speak! Speak, ye masses! And the God of Happy College Students will bring luck and light into your world.   
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
3- Forbidden Truths  
  
Turel stood by the shattered window of his courtroom and watched light seep into the eastern sky. It was maddening, to wonder if it would be his last dawn. The eighth sunrise, as Kain had said. Should he count the hours, waiting for Raziel to come? Should he spend another day watching his children fall to madness? It was very emotionally draining, he thought with impatience, to wait for death. He would be quite annoyed if he had to do it again tomorrow.  
  
Lenath sat with his back against the wall, staring vacantly ahead with his squinty eyes. No, Turel decided, he had counted the dawns correctly. Lenath had had a sound mind before the crumbling, and even now his thoughts were usually sharp. Turel read it in his son's eyes: this was the last day.  
  
Well, he thought bleakly to himself. That was reassuring.  
  
He had not been mortal for many centuries, yet he could feel the anxious stirring in his heart. The fact that he had died once before was no comfort. This would be different... he would not rise again. Before him, he saw no future, a complete absence of time and being. There was only void.  
  
Turel turned from the window with a grimace. No time for that. He had one last thing to do.  
  
Kain's secondborn walked to the dial set into the back of the throne. The combination had 25 numbers and had to be set precisely. Turel had ensured that his greatest treasure would remain secret.  
  
The wall to the left of the throne groaned as the last number was set, revealing a wide staircase that descended into darkness. Turel dragged his huge body down the stairs, not bothering to manipulate a second dial that would conceal the passage. Lenath would not interfere with this final errand, and the thick doors of the throne room blocked all others.  
  
Down the long, pitch-black passage Turel slithered until he saw traces of light dancing on the walls. He pressed forward into the last chamber, where he found the source: the walls danced with blue flames. There was no fuel they fed on; they simply burst out of the walls without cause.  
  
No cause, that is, except for the vampire that sat cross-legged in the middle of the chamber. Turel was not ashamed to say that he was afraid of her. The thick chain binding her neck to the wall had hardly any use; both of them knew she could snap it off in seconds. Even after her eyes were gouged out, Turel was wary of her. But she had never tried to escape, though she had the power ten times over. And that sat with him least comfortable of all.  
  
She lifted her head as he entered. "You return," she said evenly.  
  
"I do indeed, my dear."  
  
Her hollow eye sockets looked directly at him. It was uncanny. "And you are afraid."  
  
My, aren't we feeling blunt. "Am I. Afraid of what?"  
  
She merely stared at him sightlessly.  
  
"*Ishtar*."  
  
"Of me," Ishtar replied. "Of the disease that even now flays the minds of your children to nothing. And... of someone who was once your brother, and the end he will bring that you cannot see."  
  
"But," Turel said as he slithered closer, "you can."  
  
The look on her face might have been a smile. "Yes."  
  
"Indulge me, my dear."  
  
Ishtar turned her head toward one of the disembodied blue flames that lingered on the walls. In answer, it stretched to meet her, coiling through the air in a lazy spiral.  
  
"He will come," she said, "and you will die."  
  
"That much I can see."  
  
The blue fire-rope encircled her, creating an eerie halo along her long black mane. "That much I will tell you."  
  
"Insolent bitch," Turel snarled. "Answer me."  
  
"Oh?" One end of the coiling blue fire snaked toward him, taking the form of a hissing serpent's head. Ishtar bore a similar expression. "You do extend your welcome, 'my lord'."  
  
Turel's eyes narrowed and she cried out in pain as the bones in her left arm snapped for apparently no reason. The flaming snake drew back, twisting painfully in the air, but only for a moment. Then it simply hovered there, burning, as Ishtar faced him expressionlessly.  
  
"He will come." Her voice, low and quiet, trembled with wrath. "But he will not kill you."  
  
"Kain said no such thing."  
  
"Your beloved Kain did not say he would be your murderer. He will come, and you will die, and neither is related to the other."  
  
Turel growled with frustration. If the bitch persisted, he would snap her in half. "You do not expect me to believe he will spare his *dearest brother.*"  
  
Ishtar laughed coldly. "No. He will not *need* to kill you. You cannot imagine what destiny Fate has chosen for... Raziel. What destiny Kain is planning for him still."  
  
"You are a tiring wench. If your tongue speaks nothing but riddles, I will remove it."  
  
Without warning, all the blue flames in the room converged over Ishtar's head. They rippled in the air and assumed the shape of a fiery snake again, this time eating its own tail. The oroborus slowly revolved above her as she spoke.  
  
"Know only this, Turel: your meaningless life will end with a meaningless death. But you are impatient to meet it. Come, let me bring it to you."  
  
There was a crash like thunder as the blue flames vanished and the passage plunged into darkness. Turel heard Ishtar's cold laugh just before a tsunami of mental energy crashed into his head. His skull shivered with pain and the dark world reeled like a wagon wheel as he felt her relentless assault on his mind.  
  
But the pain passed. Turel bared his fangs in the darkness; the insolence! He would take off her head-  
  
He was interrupted by echoing laughter emanating from above, from his throne room. The clan leader froze, his thoughts refusing to believe what slowly dawned on him: the mental assault had not been meant for him.  
  
The target was Lenath.  
  
"No!" Turel screamed. He raced up the dark stairway, ignoring the pains of his awkward body. He burst into the light of the throne room to see his son, his beloved firstborn son, grinning madly at him like a giddy skeleton.  
  
"Pumpkin pie," Lenath giggled.  
  
"No," his father replied in a desperate whisper.  
  
Lenath grasped one of the decorative staves on the wall and pulled. Turel walked toward him slowly, nearly wild with loss and disbelief.  
  
"Well," Lenath said.  
  
"No..."  
  
"Well." He turned to Turel almost playfully. "Spar with me, Marcus?"  
  
Lenath charged and Turel stepped aside, hoping against all hope that Lenath would snap out of it. But his son turned, and Turel knew he could not be saved. As the mad vampire charged again, Turel saw a glimmer of comfort; the staff was edged on both ends.  
  
Turel did not resist as the staff sank into his flesh. He merely redirected the weapon's other end and watched as it plunged into his son's abdomen. To the clan leader and his massive body, the wound was like a small thorn. To Lenath...  
  
The younger vampire gasped and staggered. His borrowed blood dripped down the staff, mingling with his father's. The staff bled at both ends. Turel watched helplessly as his son weakened and finally died.  
  
At that moment, the rays of the eighth sunrise fell brightly into the throne room like a silent mockery. 


	5. Chapter Four: From Ourselves

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
Wooha, reviewers! Much gratitude goes out to you all.  
  
Lillian: Thanks for the compliments. But... *sucks it away with a vacuum cleaner* None of that self-deprecatory nonsense! A teacher of mine told me that everyone has something to teach, and for once it wasn't teacherly bullshit. You have full rein to deal out criticism with the best of them. 8)  
  
Syvia: Yah, I reached a kind of crisis once I finished this chapter because it seemed that Turel is the most sympathetic character in the story! Lousy minds-of-their-own characters.  
  
Mana Angel: I know what you mean, though Melchiah seemed to be the most redeemable of the five. That is, he was the only one without a huge ego and a compulsive urge to taunt Raziel. :\  
  
Ruff_Collie: Glad you like it! *grin*  
  
DigitalJessie: Ooh, sorry I kept you waiting so long. I hope you and the, eh... chibi thing were comfortable.  
  
Demon Hunter Anamae: Thanks for the feedback. The ending will indeed have a little 'oomph' to it... but it won't come for a while. ;)  
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
4- From Ourselves  
  
In the darkness beneath Turel's throneroom, Ishtar sat alone and waited.  
  
Three hours had passed since the Clan Lord had killed his own son and fled. Poor half-mad Turel; he did not see the significance of this day. But, Ishtar reflected, though his servants had removed two of her eyes, they could not have removed the last. And with that invisible eye, she saw all that he could not.  
  
The air itself was taut with expectation. It was as if the whole of Nosgoth teetered at the edge of some monumental event, waiting for one moment to propel it into the future. She saw time spreading like a blanket from her feet down a dozen possible paths, and at the same time she saw tiny events in the present gathering together. A Zephonim in the Silenced Cathedral compulsively walked in figure-eights... packs of mad Turelim straggled south... the wreckage of a noble sought revenge against his last brother. Ishtar had seen these moments for centuries.  
  
She smiled in the darkness. That had not diminished the excitement she felt for finally living them.  
  
The vampire stood and stretched her limbs. At long last, it was time to be free.  
  
Ishtar's claws closed around the heavy links of the chain. If Raziel had seen the spell she cast next, immediately he would have thought of the two Turelim in the petrified forest who had decayed to death. The chain rusted and turned brittle as if time itself flowed from Ishtar's claws. The links rottted away, eroded into thin metal lines, and finally dissolved into fine gray dust.  
  
Ishtar brushed it off and flexed her neck thankfully. Ahhh, small pleasures. From here... her blind face clouded. From here...  
  
She stumbled to the chamber's entrance, touching the walls with her claws. Up the stairs, she knew, into the throne room, past the doors to the left, and into the streets. Small journey. And yet...  
  
Without fail, she always saw something ominous in new beginnings.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Less than a mile away, the shadow of ruined wings fell across the Turelim city.  
  
Raziel had, at first, not understood the fate of Turel's clan. The city of his brother had looked imposing when he had stumbled across it at last in the strained light of dawn. It was built of pinnacles of volcanic rock that looked like black claw-marks gouged into the sky. But the bridges connecting the rock-towers showed no hint of movement. As he paced through the city, he had not found any of its inhabitants, but he could hear them. The rocks distorted the echoes of what sounded like battle, so it seemed to come from all around. Raziel knew the Turelim were there, but they were off fighting an enemy he had not seen.  
  
Would the humans have attacked them as they had attacked the Dumahim?  
  
Could the Turelim have fallen as easily?  
  
Raziel's hooves slapped gently against the stone as he crossed another rock span. Turel was not as proud has his brother Dumah had been, he reflected. Not even when Raziel, his greatest rival and only superior excepting Kain, had been sentenced to death as a traitor.  
  
Such a long time ago. Perhaps, in the centuries that Raziel had spent endlessly falling, that too had changed.  
  
He caught sight of the ruined mass that had been the smokestack and stepped to the edge of the rock span for a better look. The entire top half of the stack was missing, and part of it lay in a scorched heap at the smokestack's base. Some kind of violent struggle had happened here days ago, more intense than the other battles Raziel heard throughout the city. Thin lines of smoke still seeped from the ruins as if the flames had not fully died out.  
  
Wait.  
  
Raziel squinted at the ruins and as he watched, a cloud of smoke burst from the wreckage and curled upward. The smoke from the ruins grew thicker.  
  
Someone was rebuilding the fire.  
  
He felt something lurch inside him and he broke into a run, the slapping of his hooves building to a rapid crescendo. With a reckless leap he left the rock span, wings outstretched, and fell heavily onto another rock span level with the smokestack's entrance. This Raziel entered at a dead run, only slowing when he entered the smokestack's central chamber.  
  
Whoever was building the fire was not immediately visible. The floor formed a rim around a large pit in the middle of the room, which blazed with yellow light and thick smoke. Looking up, he saw the smoke travel up through the hollow interior of the tower and into the sky.  
  
The smoke filling the tower's remnants made it almost impossible to see. Raziel let the Soul Reaver slide down his arm and the blade licked at his flesh with what he swore was hunger. This would be the only Turelim he had actually encountered all day. If he had to beat it for hours, he decided, he would learn where Turel lay hidden.  
  
Some catastrophic noise cracked through the tower, and Raziel turned in time to see several massive logs tumbling into the central pit. They had been tossed in almost carelessly. He dropped to a crouch, the Soul Reaver wavering brightly in front of him, and strained his eyes for a look at his adversary.  
  
Behind the smoke, red vampiric eyes gazed back at him.  
  
"Raziel," said a familiar voice. "You should not have come."  
  
Raziel merely stared as his brother moved into sight. The Soul Reaver burned ferociously up and down his arm. "Turel."  
  
His oldest brother's mutations were as grotesque as those of his younger brethren. Raziel's first thought was that Turel had mutated into a giant slug. His skin had the rubbery texture and filmy color of maggots. His squirming lower body crawled with what looked like insect legs, but were actually protrusions of tiny bones. Every time Turel moved, the snapping of these bones accompanied it. He dragged himself forward with one arm, thick and muscular, while another, ridiculously thin and emaciated, slapped uselessly at his other shoulder. His head had sprouted gigantic ears with leathery membranes. But the worst mockery was his chest, where long ago he had tattooed his clan symbol. Not only was it now blown up and distorted into a grotesque parody, but from the center of his symbol, what might have been a leathery wing hung useless. And it was far too similar to the wings by which Raziel had been damned.  
  
Turel stopped his painful slither, and his brother watched as the tiny bones beneath his belly began to heal. "How courteous of you to grant me a visit, big brother," he said. "But I'm afraid you will be less than satisfied, Raziel. You have nothing to do here."  
  
"I remember you being wiser than that."  
  
Turel gave him a pained smile. "And I you," he said as he dragged himself back the way he came. "But... fate has a way of delivering justice. Your task was complete before you began it." He gathered the logs stacked against the tower's wall and cast them down into the pit and the growing flames. "Leave," he said when the crash subsided. "Grant me that small mercy."  
  
Raziel slowly followed his brother. In his mind, Turel watched bemusedly as Raziel plunged toward the unending pain of the Abyss.   
  
"Did you do so much for me?" he demanded quietly. "Did you do so much for my clan?!"  
  
"All I could do then, brother, is all I can do now. It is the great truth and injustice that we, vampires, immortals and gods, cannot weep. That is..." He slashed his claws across his own chest. In moments, the flesh began to mend. "...except to bleed."  
  
"Soon, you will not have to."  
  
Turel let out a sickly laugh. "Would it stop so readily! No, Raziel, the damned never cease weeping. Surely it is damnation to see my children destroy each other in their madness, my clan's mastery crumble to idiocy..." He looked at Raziel intensely. "...because of you."  
  
Raziel looked at him incredulously. "Clearly, your sense has abandoned you. But-"  
  
"You have not watched," Turel mumbled heedlessly. "No abandonment of the senses was this... but their ruthless and indiscriminate destruction. This cannot be called insanity. It is... far more terrible." He leaned over the pit's edge to glimpse the flames and leaned back, satisfied. "And to know it is your own doing. To know you have piled each stone of your empire on the other, and it is your hand that tears them down."  
  
"*Turel*-"  
  
"This was Lenath," Turel said mournfully. He gently picked up a limp body, a sharpened staff still protruding from its flesh. He gave the corpse a long look, then threw it into the flames.  
  
"So you see," Turel said, turning, "how you and I have suffered the same fate. Disgrace, loss of all for which we have labored." He painfully slithered toward the pit. "And what meaning can all the works of the world have when they are destroyed by their *creator*?"  
  
Raziel's eyebrows drew together. He was on the verge of understanding what Turel planned...  
  
Turel met Raziel's white glowing eyes with his own red eyes. "In the end," he murmured, "there was no meaning."  
  
Raziel stumbled toward the pit. He meant to call out, in rage or disappointment or something else he did not know, but he could not. Instead he listened to the cries of his brother burning in the flames, curling up with the smoke. 


	6. Chapter Five: A World of Fear

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
I love you review people. Absolutely love you. Hence this chapter, which is long for me. I meant to respond to your reviews, but I'm a little rushed right now. Next chapter, I promise. Enjoy!  
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
5- A World of Fear  
  
Katalina quickly untied a glyph globe from the latticework built over her crops, her fingers grasping the chain in a grip that left her fingernails white. High above her head, the walls of the human city crawled with humans running back and forth, and the vampires they fought against. She looked up almost regretfully; there had been a time when she would fight with the best of them. The time had passed. If it came to that, she would fend off the leeches with a pitchfork. But for now, the false sunlight was her greatest weapon.  
  
Katalina flinched as an explosion rocked the wall ahead of her. There was chaos everywhere. Still holding the glyph globe, she ran toward the tiny shed collapsing into itself at the edge of her lands. First thought: get the pitchfork. Second thought: gods, she was too old for this.  
  
The door closed with comforting firmness and she leaned against it, recovering her breath. The shed was completely dark except for the glyph globe and the line of light under the door. For a moment, she held up her light and stared at the rows of tools she had lined along the sagging walls. Some of them were older than she was and unusable, and these were a rich red-brown from rust and years of working the soil. Others she had made only a year ago and they kept a faint metallic tinge. Here, where Katalina had spent so much of her time, she could almost block out the sounds of invasion.   
  
It had started so suddenly, Katalina mused, an hour or two past noon. Mornis had run through the streets shouting the news: "The northeast wall has been breached!" Katalina had been worried, but not panicked. After all, it had been daylight, and the vampiric adults did not travel in large groups.  
  
Except this one time.  
  
The news poured in hour by hour: the vampires had taken over St. Ager's Temple, the fountain, the market square. It was not all bleak- as news of the invasion spread, those who could joined the small but growing army against the vampires. Street by street, the battle went back and forth.  
  
The vampires always gained more ground, though. They were the strange new breed that looked like the clan in the north, only mutated and quite insane, every last one. The stories of their power sounded like children's tales; they told of men being ripped apart from the inside out, or impaled by roots that sprang suddenly from the ground, or turned mysteriously into puddles of water. From the panicked news that flooded from the battle, the stories were not only true, but understated.  
  
And how the people around her had glared at her with every batch of bad news. Katalina saw their thoughts in their eyes: the vampires, gathering in such unprecedented numbers, had come from the north. The very direction to which her decaying blue friend had gone, and from which he had not returned. No, they still did not trust their messiah.  
  
Perhaps they had good reason. Raziel had told her that Kain was dead, and the next day an army of vampires appeared at the gates. If she had not known the hatred he held against his own kind, she would have cursed him with the rest.  
  
If he would only come and help them before it was too late...  
  
Katalina snapped back to herself and grabbed one of the newer pitchforks, which still had all its tines intact. She knew that her land, her city, would be little more than piles of stones surrounded by broken walls by the next morning. Perhaps not even that- she heard that some had resorted to lighting their fields on fire to destroy the vampires lurking through them. The depraved creatures had not reached this far but the only deciding factor was time.  
  
She opened the door and her eyes immediately met the rows of plants she had spent her life raising. Freshly weeded as of yesterday, in fact. The leaves were green as they could get under the glyph globes, the dirt between them was rich and black. Stems rose boldly to the sky in defiance of the thinning smoke from the north.  
  
Katalina hefted the pitchfork over her shoulder as she had so many times before and let out a dignified huff. Hell take her if she burned her own crops!  
  
On the walls, it seemed, the vampire-creatures had lost ground. Katalina watched as one of the guards on the walls sprayed his flamethrower, focing his opponent to back off. Back off, that is, and into the ready pike of another guard who had just come up the stairs. She allowed herself a tired smile before turning to close the shed door.  
  
Instead, she came face to face with a man she had not heard approaching.  
  
"Oh," Katalina said in surprise.  
  
He smiled and inclined his head graciously. "Madam," he said.  
  
She looked him over. He dressed like a peasant, much like herself, but he could not have lived nearby; she had never seen him before. Must be a refugee from the other side of the city. He was younger than her, but by no more than a decade... his pale brown eyes, nearly golden-brown in color, had a worldly look to them.  
  
"I..." Katalina shook her head. "I apologize, I did not hear you come."  
  
"Oh, tis no offense, madam," he replied with a smile. "I am rather famous for appearing out of nowhere."  
  
She smiled tersely and shifted the weight of the pitchfork on her shoulder. "What is it, then?"  
  
"The matter of the vampires. I have just come from the thick of the fighting with ill news."  
  
"More?"  
  
"A bit, I'm afraid. The odds are... very much against us."  
  
"Ohh, if you've come to ask me to fight..." Katalina chuckled.  
  
"No," he said. "To leave."  
  
"Leave?"  
  
"The citadel."  
  
She looked at him in disbelief. "But... that's madness. There is no place to go, except the vampires' lands. This city is the only safe place-"  
  
"WAS... the only safe place. If you remain in the naive belief that the walls will protect you, you will die here."  
  
Katalina's eyebrows furrowed. This man was quite arrogant for a peasant.  
  
He must have guessed her thoughts, for his voice softened. "You do not have to go, and it is only for your sake that we are now asking it. If you will not... then ask it of those you know. It is the only way we will survive."  
  
She paused and considered. "Where would we go?" she said at last.  
  
"To the east lies the territory of the vampiric clan that was conquered centuries ago. It is empty now, and the most defensible position within miles. It is your best hope. Take what you can and who you can. After the battle..." He trailed off.  
  
Katalina nodded in understanding and planted the pitchfork in the ground butt-end down like a walking stick. "Very well, sir."  
  
He gave her a smile that looked rather smug. "Thank you," he said. "May the gods protect you."  
  
"And you," she said. With that, she set off at a steady pace for Mornis's land. The man was right; news from the battle had not been encouraging. With nightfall on the way, it could not improve. The citadel, for the only time in its history, would fall to the vampires.  
  
At least, Katalina thought bleakly, the humans themselves would live on.  
  
The man watched her go, smirking contentedly to himself. So, he had managed to keep the tomato woman alive. Perhaps that would have value for him later. But he would need evidence.  
  
Almost lazily, he looked up and removed one of her glyph globes from its place. Marvelous contraptions, really. Doubly so for humans.  
  
He walked into the shed, humming to himself. Moments later, he was gone.  
  
********************************************************  
  
The ruins of the smokestack stank of flames reaching desperately for their last bit of fuel, but Raziel did not smell them. For the first time since his resurrection, he was dreaming.  
  
He dreamt he stood in the middle of a forest glade at night. Moonlight shone down, pure as mountain water, upon the smooth surfaces of nine massive pillars that reached into the sky. They bored the designs of the Pillars of Nosgoth, but they stood unbroken and infinite, and his eyes could not find where they ended. In front of each pillar stood a human in black robes and, at their feet, a token of their position. Only the center pillar had no such token... only the Pillar of Balance.  
  
Something was wrong. He watched as each pillar bent and collapsed, each Guardian vanished so only their black robes were left. But the Balance Guardian remained. From this figure, black tentacles emerged and wrapped themselves around the pillars like mistletoe around oak. And like that plant, the tentacles suffocated all life.  
  
The Balance Guardian approached dream-Raziel slowly. Behind the Guardian, holes opened in the pillars like screaming mouths. Raziel saw their surfaces rippling as if some massive creature was trapped inside each pillar and strangled by the Balance Guardian's grip.  
  
The black robe fell away from the ninth figure and it was Kain's voice that said, "My boy," but it was not Kain. There was nothing beneath the robe but shadow.  
  
Then the moonlight shone more brightly and the shadow was gone, and its tendrils vanished. The pillars straightened and soared up to the sky. Stumbling backwards, Raziel saw the nine pillars lean toward each other and braid themselves into a gleaming white rope.  
  
The glade vanished, and he was floating in space. The rope formed a circle surrounding him, and it spun faster and faster, bright and brilliant, before exploding into glowing white sparks. Where the rope had been was a blue snake- two blue snakes, each with the other's tail in its mouth, forming a ring. He watched as one snake devoured the other, until its own tail was in its mouth. It stopped eating and hung there, whole, complete.  
  
It released its hold on its tail and its glowing blue eyes turned to him. Raziel shivered.  
  
"You promised," it said.   
  
Raziel opened his eyes and saw the last smoke of his brother's pyre curling up the smokestack. He still saw the snake, its accusing eyes, the broken pillars that had birthed it. But they faded beneath the rising clarity of the stench of burnt wood.  
  
He sat up, blinking at his surroundings, and remembered. He had removed his cowl long enough to devour Turel's soul, and it had slammed into him as had the souls of his father and younger brothers. Turel had been gifted with true telekinesis; no wonder it took him so little effort to gather and throw logs with one arm. Raziel had watched the corpse disintegrate, and then he had watched the flames. With no one else to hunt and his brother's last words to contemplate, he allowed himself a bit of rest for the first time and had willed himself to sleep.  
  
And that dream...  
  
Raziel rose to a standing position and glanced about. Overhead, the sky was navy blue. It was nearly night.  
  
...he had had that dream before. It had been slightly different and it had asked something of him, he couldn't remember what. But that had been centuries ago, mere decades, in fact, before his execution. Surely it was no longer relevant.  
  
He idly paced to the smokestack's entrance, scratching at the back of his neck through the cowl. What now? Truly, what now? He could not imagine. All who had wronged him were dead. He had never thought what purpose he would have from this moment. The Elder, his guide and mentor since his awakening, had been curiously silent since Kain's death. There was no one to suggest his next move.  
  
Raziel's steps carried him out of the smokestack and almost into the Turelim waiting just outside.  
  
He sprang back and the Soul Reaver raced down his arm expectantly. A quick glance told him that this one was especially bizarre. There were none like it. He reached back, ready to swing, but two things occurred to him at once. First, it looked nothing like a Turelim. Second, it was not acting hostile at all.  
  
Raziel lowered the Soul Reaver and studied the creature warily. It had a more human form than the vampires he had seen, though its skin was a strangely gleaming ebony. Imposing black wings stretched out to its sides, enormous enough to carry it in flight. A dark blue, almost black mane, ran from its head down its spine to the tip of a thin, rat-like tail. Its body shape was vaguely reminiscient of a woman due to the shape of her waist and hips, but her flat chest looked more like the underbelly of a snake. Her face revealed her vampiric origins, sporting pointed ears and (albeit unusually long) fangs, but at the same time the features were more... demonic, the cheekbones stretched grotesquely. There was no telling what her eyes would have looked like, for they had been gouged out what must have been centuries ago.  
  
"What are you, creature?" he said at last.  
  
She turned her blind face toward his voice, eyelids blinking over absent eyes. Even so, he thought he saw a dawning spark of recognition in her inhuman face.   
  
"Raziel," she breathed. He took a step back. There had been a tiny shred of hope in him, even after seeing his clan territory, even after his meeting with Kain. Raziel felt it, impossibly growing, as the creature bowed to him, black wings gracefully bobbing on her back.  
  
It could not be.  
  
"Father." 


	7. Chapter Six: Noble Blood

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
I think the God of Indirect Retribution is trying to tell me something. First I give you all a cliffhanger, then I have several near-death experiences in an overcrowded mosh pit. Fear not, I've learned my lesson!  
  
Syvia- Well, not so much the whole empire, but Turel was talking mostly about his own clan. This chapter explains his part in the Turelim madness, in a roundabout way. :p Don't worry, I'll clear it up later on.  
  
plink- I'm afraid the mystery won't be fully explained until... Chapter Ten or so. Stick around. ;)  
  
Mana Angel- Heh! Well, think of it this way: after years of being locked up by the clan lord, she has a right to be a little miffed. ;) I like your idea, but at that point Turel was mostly thinking aloud to himself; I have a feeling he would have spoken aloud even if Raziel hadn't come along. But I might go back and give him a short little section in Chapter Four, his thoughts just before Raz arrives. *ponders*  
  
Lilith- Thanks, I'm glad you like this! I'm also a fan of your story, despite the first few paragraphs. ;) BTW, that Sarafan Antar-ass... do give him a few kicks for me, will you? And yeah, sorry about the cliffie. I paid for it.  
  
Digital Jessie & Chibi Thing- Yeah, I took liberties with Turel's appearance. Compared to the other clan lords, Turel looked so normal in the concept art. Now he's screwed up like all his brothers! *proud smile* Oh, thanks for telling your friend about this little story. It makes me glowy. *pats your chibi thingy so (s?)he doesn't feel excluded* I love you too, little thing!  
  
MB- *ducks head* Me sorry! It won't happen again!... hopefully... *gulp*  
  
Rocker Baby- Ayah, you are too kind. *rattles your donation around in an empty coffee cup* Haha! It's more money than I ever dreamed of! *goes off and buys a year's supply of Ramen noodles*  
  
Ruff Collie- Aww, thanks a lot! Hope this chapter resolves the cliffie satisfactorily? *whimper*  
  
Lora Helen- I'm SOOOORRRRYYYYY! *sniffsniff* I hope you and Twowa weren't waiting out in the cold. But. *drumroll* The next chapter is here! *cliffie melts into a shadow of its former self*  
  
Thanks again for the reviews!   
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
6- Noble Blood  
  
Ishtar heard her father make an odd choking sound in his throat. She had seen his reaction in visions, the way his glowing eyes flared and his wraith blade died into hibernation. Her patriarch would not have known this, though; he did not yet know she was only half-blind.  
  
"*What*... did you say?" Raziel choked.  
  
She tilted her head. "Interesting way of greeting your children, father," she said with a quiet smile.  
  
A beat of silence. "You are a Razielim?"  
  
Ah, he could not have known how vulnerable he sounded. So desperate and yet unwilling to hope. In answer, Ishtar slowly unfurled the massive black wings upon her back. "Is this proof enough?"  
  
His footsteps rang closer on the stone. She knew how he hesitated before reaching out and running his claws over her wings just as Kain had over his own so long ago. Her patriarch's talons were cold but she kept her wings as still as she could, letting him explore what he knew would have been his.  
  
"Impressive," Raziel murmured. "I... did not think any of my children had survived in this degenerate age."  
  
"Many more did not."  
  
His talons ran down the edge of her right wing and trailed off its tip. "What has become of us?"  
  
"I owe you that story, Raziel. But as you can hear, this is not the best of places to tell it."  
  
"I hear noth-"  
  
On cue, a chorus of battle cries burst from the rocks in the distance, followed immediately after by an opposing chorus. Though distant, the rocks amplified the sounds of battle until it sounded as if armies were clashing. Beneath that was the soft hiss of fabric shifting on flesh as Raziel looked for the source of the sound.  
  
"Indeed. Shall we?" Ishtar turned and stumbled blindly across the rock span.  
  
"Will you not, at least, indulge me with the gift of your name?"  
  
"Oh, you are a hard bargainer!" she said with a laugh. "But yes. I am Ishtar."  
  
"A pleasure," he said when he caught up to her.  
  
Ishtar passed her claws along the stone rail of the rock span, stopping when her claws reached a corner. "Turn right," she said.  
  
Raziel slipped past the bulk of her wings, walking in front of her. "Are you so certain?"  
  
"Yes. Why do you ask?"  
  
"The stone is on fire ahead."  
  
"Right." She kept walking, keeping her claws on the rail as a guide.  
  
"Ah... that means the way is blocked."  
  
Ishtar grinned in his direction. "No, not really. You'll see." Her wings bent as she walked past him. Ah well, he'd catch up. She stumbled on until she could feel the heat of the flames against her face and she stretched her arm toward the unnatural fire. Raziel had been mistaken: the stone was not on fire, it had been turned into fire. The arch of the rock span continued unbroken in a flame bridge. The mutated Turelim were more powerful than she had thought.  
  
"Ishtar," Raziel said behind her.  
  
"Shh..." She let her eyelids fall as she concentrated, talons still outstretched, her mind doing its best to block out the cackling of the far-off Turelim. Were they approaching, running the other way, or remaining where they fought? Impossible to tell. Soon the sounds dropped like a stone from her consciousness. Their replacement hit her in a cold wave, a welcome chill that coiled down her spine, through her nerves. The familiar black power. For an instant she could see, both in front of her and behind: the flames hardened as if frozen and turned to stone, Raziel's white eyes grew huge. She saw his thoughts, the suspicion, wonder, and pride. She could taste the prey in the mouth of a millipede ten miles away.  
  
Ishtar shook her head and let it go, and she was blind again.  
  
"Now then," she said, and plunged ahead before Raziel could ask any questions. Immediately she winced. The points of the petrified flames burrowed into her hooves most uncomfortably.  
  
"Wait," Raziel called as he caught up to Ishtar a second time. "What manner of sorcery did you just display?"  
  
"I *will* tell you, Raziel. Soon." Though his curiosity was still palpable.  
  
They worked slowly but steadily through the Turelim city. The sounds of battle faded but became more violent, as if the combatants had become desperate or simply eager for a conclusion. Raziel and Ishtar had almost left the city when the cataclysm came. A crackle of warning came first, then the booming roar that made the rocks, even this far out, tremble. She remembered how the pinnacles of obsidion tilted and fell while others plummeted straight down. Oh, and the blue lightning that flared into the sky. Mustn't forget that.  
  
The rocks crashed and echoed and finally, everything was silent.  
  
"It must have been a decisive victory," Raziel commented.  
  
"Not quite." Ishtar turned and inched her way toward the path that led south out of the city. "The blast killed both packs. Though that may have seemed a victory to their diseased minds."  
  
"Surely you could not have known that."  
  
She shrugged. "The Turelim are predictable anyway... to an extent."  
  
"How is it you know so much of these creatures?"  
  
"Simply, I have lived among, or, beneath them. For..." She frowned. "...ages."  
  
The two walked down the path from the Turelim city and both remained silent. Ishtar let him brood; she could not imagine how she would react in Raziel's position. Doubts, hidden hopes, wishes- all shifted about in the space of an hour. He must have had so much to say, so many hopes he was afraid to shatter.  
  
Or, she thought with a smile, he was not much of a conversationalist.  
  
A strangely tense hour passed before Raziel at last spoke.  
  
"This cannot be..."  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"This forest. It could not be so close to the city."  
  
"Hm. Are you certain you weren't lost the first time you passed through?"  
  
"It would not have taken so long, still."  
  
"Ah... well. I suppose I found a shortcut."  
  
"Indeed." Three, two... "Now, I believe you owe me a narrative or two."  
  
"Wait... just a bit more." Surprisingly, Raziel obliged her and they descended the low hills that slipped into the petrified forest he had passed through the night before. When they reached a low dip in the forest surrounded by a kind of deadfall of bowed trees, Ishtar turned to him. "Now then," she said, lowering herself into a sitting position, "What did you want to know?"  
  
********************************************************  
  
Now that it was finally time to speak, Raziel's mind presented nothing to say. He sat down facing her, looking into the neutral eye sockets that did not gaze back.   
  
"Who are you?"  
  
She smiled. "Ishtar."  
  
"I believe you have imparted that information already. Who is your progenitor? How have you endured these ages in the territory of my brother?"  
  
Ishtar's tail straggled like a dying snake on the ground. "My progenitor was Strane, son of Leander, your son. As to how I survived... I did not endure alone."  
  
"Are they also in the Turelim city?"  
  
"No, in a keep far to the southeast. We fled there, in the beginning, and for a while we were tolerated.  
  
"And then?"  
  
Ishtar looked away. "We were not."  
  
"Nevertheless, you live."  
  
"Because of the pride and ambition of your brother."  
  
"Kain must have known."  
  
"He did. But... he did nothing."  
  
Raziel silently shook his head. The story made no sense, but he had no idea what to ask to make it clearer. When he looked up, she was gazing directly at him.  
  
"You can see?" Raziel asked.  
  
"No." Ishtar bit her lip with her elongated fangs. "Not with my eyes, that is. It is difficult to explain... but I suppose you could say, I see in time. Moments in the past, the future. Very fleetingly in the present, and not always nearby."  
  
"Such a strange evolution."  
  
"I am not so certain it is an evolution, Raziel. It seems... it has spread, in a bastardized form, to the Turelim."  
  
"How do you know this?"  
  
"I have seen it."  
  
"Is it this 'seeing in time' that drives them mad?"  
  
"No, not by itself. It is part of a greater gift. You glimpsed it on the bridge that had turned to fire."  
  
Raziel tilted his head. How could he forget? That was a power beyond him, beyond even Kain. Had all his children become gods? It had to be an evolution, though from the way she described it, 'disease' seemed more fitting. Yet, evolution or contagion, it had destroyed the Turelim but not his daughter.  
  
He looked down at the tattered wing he had been unconsciously toying with and half-shivered. His daughter.  
  
"It was quite remarkable," Raziel said. "With power of such magnitude at your bidding, it would seem ludicrous that Turel would have you under his power."  
  
Ishtar smiled wickedly. "I was not at his mercy, and he knew it. All the years he offered me such *gracious hospitality* in return for my knowledge, my sight... I stayed willingly."  
  
"Even when he took your eyes?"  
  
Her smiled faded. "I did not need them."  
  
Raziel shook his head slightly. "You awaited something?"  
  
"This day."  
  
The statement hung in the air ominously, and he felt a growing urge to slash something with the Soul Reaver. He had heard enough talk of fate and destiny to last several decades. Even his daughter knew more of it than he.  
  
They were interrupted by the sound of distant conversation growing closer. Ishtar grew perfectly still, almost vanishing into the shadows. Raziel inwardly grimaced but followed suit.  
  
"...but all the hair was gone!" one of the voices said.  
  
"What did you do?" the other asked.  
  
"I dunked him in gravy."  
  
"Was the color deified?"  
  
"Of course, none but the best."  
  
"I can't imagine a better setting."  
  
"It is a very well-placed stage."  
  
Of course. The Turelim monstrosities.  
  
"Let them pass," Ishtar whispered. "In three minutes they will start arguing, in ten minutes only one will be left, and in twenty-five minutes it will have joined the others.  
  
"The others?"  
  
"The other packs headed toward the human citadel."  
  
Raziel's eyes flared brightly. The human citadel housed only one person for him... one person, and rows of vegetables.  
  
"My God," he muttered, jumping to his feet. The Turelim didn't notice, but continued their nonsensical conversation. "We must reach the citadel. Quickly."  
  
"Must we?" Ishtar said, but she seemed resigned to the idea and rose with him. He set off at a fast lope and Ishtar followed as best she could, sometimes unerringly, sometimes stumbling and blind. Raziel slowed impatiently, hoping he wouldn't travel in a circle this time. It had taken him hours to get from the citadel to the forest. With growing anxiety, he remembered the empty streets of the Turelim city, how unnatural it had seemed. How many of the warped creatures were now at the citdael's gates?  
  
Behind them, angry voices rose in the first exchanges of a heated argument. 


	8. Chapter Seven: An Illusion?

*AI* Whoo... longest one yet. Once again, thanks for the reviews. Please keep 'em coming! */AI*  
  
7- An Illusion?  
  
Raziel saw the smoke rising from the human citadel long before the decimated wreckage of its walls. He could not guess at the length of the Turelim invasion; an hour? A day? The battle had left the walls pockmarked with blast holes. Although he couldn't tell for certain in the darkness, it looked as if no humans manned the walls, and that could not be a good sign.  
  
The former clan lord turned to watch Ishtar follow him. Even when her otherworldly sight failed, she stubbornly pushed on. A glimmer of a strange emotion flickered inside him through his feeling of dread, something he did not know what to make of. It had been absent for too long.  
  
She paused next to him, eye sockets turned toward the city. "It looks grim."  
  
"That it does." Raziel stared at the burning city before turning to his daughter. "Ishtar, will you tell me something?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
His white eyes returned to the citadel. "This city houses a human woman by the name of Katalina. Do you know if she lives?"  
  
Ishtar's eyebrows furrowed but she did not comment on his request. "Katalina... a girl of ten years, noble birth?"  
  
"No. Perhaps forty years, a simple farmer."  
  
She was silent for several moments. "Three children, a daughter and two sons, once a..." Her eyebrows furrowed more deeply. "...vampire hunter?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"She is alive."  
  
Raziel's shoulders unconsciously sagged with relief. "Thank you." He gave her a sidelong glance. "Will you wait here until I return?"  
  
"What!" Ishtar said indignantly.  
  
He gave her a look that, at the moment, she chose not to see. "You would stumble half-blindly through a city infested with the Turelim perversions?"  
  
"I am not *helpless*, Raziel."  
  
"My preference is to leave your theory untested. Wait." Raziel hurried toward the city, resisting the urge to curse under his breath. Of course she could defend herself; after the incident on the flaming bridge, he would be surprised if there was something she could not do. But the thought of dragging one of his last children into an embattled city... he had cheated fate enough times that he knew not to tempt it.  
  
Raziel shook his head and focused on the human citadel ahead. Through the holes in the wall, he saw the buildings lit with orange light as if the streets themselves smoldered. Had the fire been set by the Turelim? Was it a last desperate defense by the humans, or simply a hearth fire that got out of hand at the worst possible time? He snapped out of his mental daze to discover he was sprinting like a bloodcrazed wolf after its prey.  
  
It was disgusting, really. There was no need to be so anxious over a mortal who mothered him at every turn. When he had been clan lord, he would not even have remembered her name and if his brothers had ever found out, they would have mocked him for centuries to come.  
  
That time of godhood seemed so distant.  
  
The reaver of souls slowed to a halt as he reached the outer wall of the citadel. A massive hole had been burned into the stone, and the bricks at the hole's rim had the flaking, blackened look of used firewood. Raziel climbed through the hole and into the human citadel, where the carnage was even greater. Bodies and pieces of bodies littered the walkways, lit only by the light of scattered fires. Their fuel, it seemed, was barricades of furniture that had been hastily erected across the streets. Whatever there was to be burned, the humans had burned it. The moats that lay just inside the walls had inexplicably disappeared; the holes in the ground remained, but they held no water. Over all this was the dull roar of raging fire and the echoes of distant voices.   
  
Raziel hesitated before resuming his walk, this time toward the west. The city looked quite different with half its buildings on fire. He could not be sure where Katalina's land lay.  
  
A cloud of smoke hit him full in the face, acrid and sudden, as the door to a nearby building burst open. The terrified human that ran through it stopped abruptly at the sight of Raziel. The man's panic doubled and he veered to the left, fleeing both the soul reaver and whatever was in the building. Raziel spared him a puzzled glance before turning to the open doorway.  
  
He did not recognize the creature that emerged in the small explosion of falling rock. Too large to fit in the doorway, it had the stocky build of a bear or wolverine, but that was difficult to see past its hide of wiry quills. These glowed orange from the flames within the building behind it, and the edges of the quills glinted wetly. The demon's eyes were more like chasms gouged into its body offering a glimpse into a being that seemed composed purely of fire. When it opened its mouth to snarl at its new prey, there was nothing down its throat but an orange glow.   
  
Raziel edged backwards warily. This was no Turelim.  
  
Its jaws parted as if to roar but instead, the flame down its throat rushed out in a stream of billowing fire. Raziel skittered to the side and barely dodged the demon's attack. He sprang toward its flank, careful to stop short of its quills. Luckily, the bulk of the demon made it too awkward to whirl in time. With a quick slash, Raziel thrust the Soul Reaver into its flesh.  
  
The wraith blade drew no blood. Instead, it crashed jarringly against the demon's hide and slid off in a spurt of blue sparks.  
  
Raziel swore. The demon, not injured in the least, glared at him with its fiery eyes. Raziel took one look, turned, and raced down the street.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Ishtar flicked the dirt from her claws with a sigh. It hadn't been very long... ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, but she was too aware of every minute for the time to pass quickly. She had drawn an elaborate scene in the dirt involving stick figure vampires and heads with X's for eyes. It had been very amusing to try it without sight. That is, it had been very amusing for about five minutes. The waiting was like sitting through a story you have heard hundreds of times... even the exciting parts got tedious.  
  
She closed her eyelids. And which part were they at now?  
  
The sound of footsteps in the dirt answered her question. Ah, yes, Ishtar thought as she heard the sound of a man clearing his throat. The first step toward the climax of the whole mess. About time.  
  
"I've been waiting," Ishtar said.  
  
The man half-smirked, if she remembered correctly. "You know who I am?"  
  
"How could I not?"  
  
"Well-spoken, my dear. Tell me... how much do you know of this pre-ordained path we are currently traversing?"  
  
Ishtar traced another X-eyed head in the dirt. "Everything."  
  
He chuckled appreciatively. "How convenient. Even the outcome presents itself to your sight?"  
  
"You know it does not. Time changes... I believe it is a good sign."  
  
"So you are willing. You are ready to join the cast of this deliciously malevolent tragedy."  
  
"As I have always been."  
  
"Despite the costs," he pressed.  
  
"Despite the costs."  
  
"Ahhh, you are his daughter after all."  
  
"Yes..." Ishtar shook her head. "I do not think he will understand. I see him, walking with us toward the end, but... I cannot believe it. He did not with you."  
  
"But you are his daughter. You have not had children, Ishtar. You have not felt the unrelenting vise of responsibility, the uncompromising sway they come to hold over your heart."  
  
"Despite the costs."  
  
For a moment, she glimpsed his pained smile. "Despite the costs."  
  
Ishtar drew in a deep breath and let it out again. "Tomorrow night then?"  
  
"Yes. Don't keep me waiting. And now, I believe, that father of yours is in need of some assistance."  
  
"I was thinking the same thing."  
  
She turned toward the city and behind her came the soft buzz of his teleportation spell at work. That had been strange, she reflected, a meeting between two immortals who had foreseen the exchange several times. Every time she saw it, she remembered, it got shorter, as both knew what the other would have said. It was easy to forget that they had only just met.  
  
All to mire themselves in the greatest of messes. But it was too late to suffer a change of heart. For once, there was no more time. For once, she thought distantly as the black power rushed through her, there was only the now.  
  
Ishtar exhaled, the sky opened, and rain fell in thick sheets to the ground. At her feet, the stick figure drawings dissolved as if they had never been.  
  
********************************************************  
  
A dead end. This was not what Raziel needed at the moment. He glared at the flaming barricade as if that would help remove it from his path, but it remained and the sound of the demon's pursuit only drew closer.  
  
The soul reaver turned as the demon rounded the corner, its huge body taking up the entire width of the alleyway. The fire in its eyes had brightened from orange to a blinding yellow-white, he noted with detached interest. The trip to the spectral realm was going to be very unpleasant.   
  
His deliverance fell from the heavens in the form of rain. It fell with no warning and in a sudden downpour that instantly formed tiny streams flowing between the cracks in the stone at his feet. Raziel watched as water found the demon's eyes and, with a dull hiss, turned them into pools of steam. It stumbled backwards, blind and frantic, and reared back on its hind legs, throwing its head back wolf-like for a scream of pain or rage. But the rain plunged into its throat, drowning the fire at its core. The roar came out in a billow of steam and a quiet gurgle. With a crash, it slumped heavily to the street, twitching until the glow in its eyes died to nothing.  
  
Raziel's claws automatically reached toward his cowl. He was not fully conscious of this until the demon's soul slammed into him, as fiery as its physical self had been. But ah, it could satisfy an appetite.  
  
"Y-y-you!"  
  
Raziel looked up at the human who had just entered the alleyway. It was the man that the demon had been chasing in the first place. Raziel glanced at the slain beast with an inner wry grin. "M-m-me?" he said mockingly.   
  
Hm, careful with that crossbow. The man's movements were so jerky, Raziel would not be surprised if he shot himself. "Don't *belittle* me, you, you pretender."  
  
The soul reaver's eyes narrowed, as much from the rain as the man's blathering. "Say again?"  
  
The human was too agitated to note the controlled flatness of his tone. "I s-said don't belittle me! We always knew. All of us. Always a vampire."  
  
"So the point of your disjointed rambling is...?"  
  
The man's grimace was most comical. "Leech!" Raziel saw his arm tense and rushed forward with blinding speed. The human's fingers still held the shape of the crossbow after Raziel ripped it from his grasp and dashed it into so many splinters against the alley wall. Even when the soul reaver had him trapped against the wall, his neck bordered on either side by claws imbedded in the stone, the human still had his arms in the same position.   
  
Raziel leaned in and silently chuckled at the human's visible struggle to understand what just happened. "Now," the soul reaver murmured, "I do not appreciate being the target of such a misplaced discourtesy." The human tried to give him a look of hatred, but he must have hit the wall harder than had been intended; the glare was a bit cross-eyed.   
  
Raziel pressed his claws together ever so slightly around the human's throat and his prey's eyes became much rounder.   
  
"Negandee!" the man squeaked.  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
Too late. The man's eyes rolled back in his head and when Raziel released his hold, the human wilted into an undignified heap on the ground.   
  
He watched the rain patter against the man's unconscious form. There was a vague notion in the back of his mind that he was living in a kind of mad-carnival purgatory, where he wronged and was wronged in random interchanges. Perhaps there was something about his appearance that led to instant hatred. For his part, he was an otherworldly creature, truly immortal and thousands of years old. Caring about lives that lasted not even a century required quite a struggle of the imagination.  
  
And now they blamed him for the Turelim mess. Humanity never failed to disgust him.  
  
Raziel left the alley and walked quickly down the abandoned streets. Let the humans live or die, the vampires starve or thrive. He had a daughter... something tugged at his mind, said he had forgotten something about Ishtar. Something... he shook the rain out of his bangs and quickened his pace. She could defend herself and he'd be back soon. It couldn't be something major.   
  
Ten minutes later, Raziel found himself walking through the familiar lanes next to Katalina's fields, eyes swinging back and forth restlessly. The fighting had not touched the fields here, near the outskirts of the city. Some of the fields nearby had been burned down to blackened fringes, but Katalina's were untouched. That is, there were gaping holes at one edge of her land where some plants must have been torn up out of the ground. But the holes were neat and no remnants of the plants had been left behind.   
  
He sighed and scratched at the back of his head with his claws. There was nothing here or nearby but glyph globes, plants, and mud that was slowly accumulating. Would they have left? No, there was nowhere left to go...  
  
Raziel turned with the intent of leaving, but instead came face to face with a man he hadn't known was there.  
  
"Hello!" the stranger said promptly. Raziel blinked more rain out of his eyes and gave him a quick once-over. The human was a peasant, it seemed, quite nondescript on the whole except for his eyes. In the light of the glyph globes, they were pale enough to look gold.   
  
That was significant, he thought suddenly. It should tell him something...  
  
"Ah. A living human. Congratulations." Raziel's wings twitched at his halting words. He couldn't remember being cut off guard by a human.  
  
"You are most gracious," the peasant said with a note of sarcasm.   
  
"Of course. It does not... seem like a common accomplishment." He cast a significant glance at the empty fields around them.  
  
"Well, no. This city has become rather unfriendly. You wouldn't think we'd stay here, would you?"   
  
"Few choices present themselves."  
  
"Which is why we choose the best ones." The man leaned back and swept his wet locks from his forehead.  
  
Raziel's eyebrows furrowed. His intuition was shouting something at him that he could not entirely decipher. This man was... off, surely. But something behind that.   
  
"-Which is, in this case, Avernus."  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
The man stared at him with his almost-golden eyes. "Avernus," he repeated. "The safest place to flee." The intense stare broke off as he turned to gaze across the empty fields. "Rebuilding is in order. And those who think you set the Turelim on the citadel-" He smirked contemptuously. "Stupidity beyond definition. There are many of us that you will find more reasonable."  
  
Raziel looked at the man silently until he turned and their eyes met. "Interesting," the soul reaver said, "how I have never heard the clan's proper name uttered by human lips."  
  
The peasant before him smiled, pleased. "Avernus," he said again. His eyes gleamed pure gold as the illusion melted away. "Avernus Cathedral, Raziel. I trust you remember the way."   
  
Raziel lunged, but his claws passed through empty air. The 'human' had already launched the teleportation spell and, for the third time, the Emperor of Nosgoth eluded him.  
  
********************************************************  
  
"Raziel."  
  
The soul reaver did not respond. He merely glared straight ahead, toward the crops he had destroyed in his rage, but not at them.  
  
"Raziel, we need to go."  
  
He made a low grunting noise in his ruined throat.  
  
"Raziel. We'll find him. You and I."  
  
Ishtar smiled as he slowly rose to a standing position. She patted him awkwardly, on what she hoped was his shoulder.  
  
"Yes..." Raziel said. Inflection gradually returned to his words. "I know of a quick passage from this place."  
  
"Alright. Let's be off then." She turned, keeping her claws on his back to ensure she walked in the correct direction. Summoning the rainstorm had taken too much out of her, her and the gift.  
  
"Your sight has left you?"  
  
"'Tis why I don't use the power overmuch," Ishtar said. "Calling the rain was quite exhausting."  
  
The cowl under her claws shifted as if he was nodding to himself. "I inferred as much." His steps abruptly stopped and she looked toward him in puzzlement.  
  
"You called the rain?" he said. "And..." She felt his claws hesitantly brush against her mane, which hung down in wet tendrils.   
  
"Indeed!" Ishtar laughed as they resumed their walk toward the warp gate. "I have always admired Rahab's gift." He couldn't keep himself from laughing with her. 


	9. Chapter Eight: Know Thyself

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
Three parts to this chapter's AI.  
  
First: a big thank-you goes out to all my reviewers once again, accompanied by a copy of Donnie Darko on DVD. You all make it much easier to attack the word processor during those dry spells. *many bows to you all*  
  
Second: Since we're about halfway through this story of mine, I thought I'd give out the disclaimer once again. I own nothing that somebody else owns!... in this case, anything in this story that you recognize from the game. This also means that I own what you don't recognize- Ishtar, Lenath, Katalina, and so forth. *more bows*   
  
Third: This is the fastest update I've done, though that's not saying much. The idea was to write it before the war with Iraq started. I was... two hours too late. All there is to say now is: may it end quickly, and may the deaths be few.   
  
Take care all...  
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT  
  
8- Know Thyself  
  
"Let's do that again," Ishtar said with a mischievous smile.  
  
Raziel looked at the warp gate where the symbol of the human citadel wavered and vanished, then back at his daughter. "Do you find it that exhilerating?"  
  
His daughter tapped her claws on his back and smiled wider. "After the Turelim city...? Like nothing in the world."  
  
"Splendid. The suspense will accumulate if we save the experience for special times."  
  
"Oh," Ishtar said in disappointment.   
  
Raziel's eyes moved up and down the warp gate. Such gates were unfamiliar additions to Nosgoth's landscape, as far as he could remember. Yet they could not have been built by vampires alone, not when other warp gates existed in the human city and the Elder's chambers at the bottom of the Abyss. Strange to think that they operated in both the spectral and material worlds, though to tell the truth, he had never spent much thought on it. It, or anything that did not deal with death and revenge.   
  
"We should set out," he said aloud.  
  
Ishtar's wings folded suddenly as if they had been dipped in something hot. "Yes... such a long walk to Avernus," she said.  
  
Raziel felt his eyebrow twitch. She knew... everything. He had no idea what to think of that. He came back to himself to see Ishtar directing a pointed look at him- well, at some point above his left shoulder.  
  
"Hm. What is it you're trying to tell me?"  
  
Her expression softened. "I have never been to this place."  
  
It felt something was crumbling inside him.  
  
"Yes," Ishtar continued. Her claws left their perch on his back as they groped toward the wall, blindly scraping over the onyx which bore the symbol of Clan Razielim. "Our homeland, devastated, profaned." Her back was to him now, and it was all he could do to keep his vision focused on the spine of dark blue hair running down to her tail. "I... have seen it, of course. But there is more to it than the look of our land." Her arm fell and she turned toward the stairwell leading away from the warp gate.   
  
"It is in the stone..."  
  
Ishtar stepped haltingly toward the stairs. Raziel followed, half in memory. She was right. He could not fully grasp the magnitude of what had happened to him unless he was in his own territory. And then he could comprehend all that had made his vampiric unlife so much fuller than what he lived now.  
  
All that he had lost.   
  
Raziel watched Isthar's face as they opened the door and stepped into what had been the center of the Razielim territory. The light from the never-dying fire at the center of the hall fell on her black skin in a rusty blaze and into her vacant eye sockets. He wondered how she saw the ruins. Again he looked at the courtyard: some clan banners, nearly gray from weathering and age, were strangely defiant as they waved in the light breeze. Broken pillars still rose along both side walls, separated by murals of intricate knotwork. At the courtyard's entrance at the opposite end from where they stood, a once brass-plated portcullis hung half-closed over the entrance. The sight of this desolation led him again to the same old sorrow, the dullness of unwelcome and unwanted change. But he could not deny a new sense tinging his awareness: there were two Razielim standing in their old homeland.  
  
Not all had been lost... just most of it.  
  
Ishtar smiled. "It is beautiful."  
  
"And abandoned."  
  
"Not entirely." She walked toward the center of the hall's tier, where a brazier decorated with knotwork flamed unchangingly. "Do you remember the summer solstice celebrations we held here?"  
  
"Refresh my recollection."  
  
Ishtar stepped in front of the brazier, arms and wings raised dramatically. "And now, to the delight of his children and the chagrin of his brother, our Lord Raziel presents...!" She looked to him expectantly.   
  
Raziel shook his head.  
  
"-The Dumahim and the Prince of Donkeys!" Ishtar finished for him. "A stunning comedy of hilarity and high adventure, written by the most esteemed playwright, Boshkus!"  
  
"Ah. I do not recall Dumah being of the mind to appreciate that particular play."  
  
"And what you delivered as punishment!" Ishtar laughed. She hung her head in imitation of a shamed Boshkus. "At- at the command of our Lord Raziel- ahem. This is a poem in honor of his most excellent and... incomparable brother, Dumah."  
  
And those had been the exact words... "Boshkus possessed some talent."  
  
"Oh, but this work ruined centuries of building a reputation. I do believe Dumah became more incensed at the apology."  
  
"Quite characteristic of him."  
  
They paused awkwardly, or so it seemed to Raziel.  
  
"And the war celebrations," Ishtar murmured. "Strings of ivy for the cloisters, nets of bone for every hall. Warriors drunk on too much rich blood..."  
  
Raziel turned away, one three-clawed hand curling in and out of a fist.  
  
Ishtar continued, voice sounding farther and farther away. "...and the bards were suddenly much more prolific- half those deeds were never done. But the more glutted the warriors became, the less they cared for serious fare. That one, he has red hair... I think his name is... Toris, yes. He stands up and spills blood on his clothes. 'Let's have a lady's song!' His eyes are slightly crossed. And many take up the chant- 'A ballad! A ballad!' The bard obeys. And they call again. 'One for Lord Raziel!' Ah, that is a devilish grin you have. You stand, you beckon..." She trailed off. "She is quite beautiful."  
  
"She was." Raziel turned slowly, more aware than ever of the tingling presence of the wraith blade on his arm. "But do you remember how her life was taken?"  
  
Ishtar frowned, unconsciously coiling her tail into a spring.   
  
"Perhaps you would grace me with a description of the genocide? Tell me, how did she die? Did fire consume her flesh, and even now do we tread on her ashen remains? Was she borne into the depths of the Abyss after me, to plummet through the burning waters forever? Or perhaps her tender body was impaled and tossed aside, left to shed her lifeblood for the gratification of *our Lord Kain*?"  
  
Ishtar's eye sockets bore into his sightlessly. "Is that all you would remember, Father?"  
  
Raziel turned toward the door opposite the passage to the warp gate. "That is what is left, Ishtar. A faded past of questionable glory, and a predestined future visible to all of Nosgoth, excepting myself." He laid his claws against the wood and shook his head. "But for now... the dawn comes within the hour. Perhaps we could spare a day for memory's sake."  
  
"Yes... perhaps." Ishtar came up beside him, no longer touching his back for guidance.  
  
She seemed to know where she was going, so Raziel shut the door behind them and allowed himself time to think. The bastard-emperor of Nosgoth lived, and although he could understand the thought intellectually, he had more trouble making it sink in. It didn't make sense, but neither did anything associated with Kain.  
  
Kain...  
  
The hatred bordered on obsession. Secretly, it had disturbed Raziel when he did not immediately remember who Boshkus was. having no memory of the children he meant to avenge... it made his quest, his fratricide, meaningless. When he had first emerged from the Abyss, he would not have allowed anything to delay his vengeance. Not even a child of his own.  
  
A quote flashed in his mind: "He who fights with monsters-"  
  
Raziel watched his daughter walking purposefully through the ruins, her steps sure and her magnificent black wings bobbing half-spread. Ishtar. He just now realized that she was everything he had hoped for in a son. Still a vampire, still a soul yanked back from its rest without consent. But there was something about her... he could not imagine Ishtar as a mortal. Surely it had never been so. She handled her power so well and with such ease, it was part of her identity.  
  
"-this do?"  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
Ishtar indicated a small room cut into the stone, its doors long since rotted away.   
  
"No rodents."  
  
She grinned. "Rats I would not mind. After a bit of time, they are very reasonable creatures."  
  
Raziel stuck his head in and looked around. It had probably been a storage room once. For now, there was nothing to look at- all its walls were bare.  
  
"Strange," he said to the wall. "You call the rain to fall in torrents upon the human city. And yet, a short walk robs you of all your strength."  
  
"A short walk! Hardly!" Ishtar said with a snort as she leaned back into a corner of the small room. "The power returned quickly enough. But had I all the power in the world, I would still be a vampire, and vampires must still feed."  
  
"It is from hunger?"  
  
"Somewhat. At dusk, I shall catch one of the Dumahim fledgelings wandering about."  
  
"You most certainly will not."  
  
Ishtar raised her eyebrows, and Raziel inwardly agreed. There were no others like him. All the same, he imagined that soul reavers were never meant to speak like anxious mortal mothers.  
  
"Their blood runs thin as water," he continued quickly. "Neither your body nor your sense of taste would rejoice over a meal of their blood."  
  
"A human then," she said, admirably struggling to hide her amusement. "Shall I rest now?"  
  
"After I extract a trivial promise from your lips."  
  
"Which is what?"  
  
"To tell me the story of our clan... in a way that makes sense."  
  
"I'll work on it."  
  
"Many thanks." Raziel paused as Ishtar wrapped her wings about herself in a leathery black cocoon. He looked at her closed eyelids, almost concave as they had no eyes to give them shape. For a moment, he almost wished Turel had died under his claws after all.  
  
He stepped away from the doorway, though he still looked inside, an odd feeling in his chest. It was like longing, but he could not define what he wanted. He wondered how many years he had spent falling in the Abyss.  
  
"Your rest will not be disturbed," Raziel whispered. Turning, he looked to the east to watch the sun rise. 


	10. Chapter Nine: Children of a Lesser God

*AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
Oi! It's been awhile. Sorry, I hope I haven't lost all of you.  
  
Well, Sylvia Plath once said that if she couldn't make a cathedral out of a poem, she'd make a footstool. She was a very wise woman. So put on your Scattered Ashes gear once again- the uber-plotty chapter has emerged at last, and we march on! *melodramatic swell of violins*  
  
*/AUTHOR'S INSERT*  
  
9- Children of a Lesser God  
  
Raziel bounced the corpse over his shoulder with a grunt. It really had been amusing to see the lost human look at him with relief, then remember that she was supposed to fear him. There had been more traffic than usual through the clanlands, which made the kill more awkward. Not that the humans would have been warm and welcoming to him anyway. But, they did seem to be refugees from the human citadel. Had Kain told the truth? Were the humans leaving for Avernus?  
  
He grinned inwardly. More food for Ishtar if they were, and more to celebrate with once Kain was finally gone.  
  
The soul reaver scratched at the back of his neck with his free hand, wincing as his claw caught on an exposed tendon. His life, if it could be described as such, had taken an interesting turn in the past few days, one he did not quite comprehend. Too many emotions rose with the review of every event that had occurred in the past while. Kain was alive; at least that was simple. Raziel hated him, and tonight he would be dead. The hatred should not have been a comfort. But it was, compared to his reaction to the discovery of Ishtar. She was his daughter, or had been in another life. And now as then she was a vampire, the creature he had spent all of his new existence hunting down and killing. He did not want to consider the implication any further.  
  
And the humans. What of them? As if in answer, the corpse slung across his shoulder suddenly lurched off-balance. Raziel tossed a hanging limb onto his back, ignoring the wet pop, and readjusted the awkward weight. His mind barely skipped a beat and wholly ignored the corpse flopping like a batch of undercooked noodles. His life as a vampire was hardly noble. He led his life as a soul reaver purely for revenge. But a human life, after immortality? Perhaps the unborn of the human race were the luckiest of them all.  
  
Raziel tilted his head, automatically softening his footfalls when he heard the voice. Dusk had faded into night; Ishtar must have awoken. Her faint voice rose and fell in a tune he remembered from long ago.  
  
"...parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme..."  
  
He turned the corner of a ruined wall to find two enormous wings spanning the width of the corridor. Ishtar seemed to be in the midst of balancing and slowly rotating on the tip of her tail.  
  
"...remember me to one who lives there..."  
  
Her tail uncoiled and her wings stretched upward. It seemed all of her weight balanced on the dark blue hairs standing rigidly straight at the end of her tail.  
  
"...she once was a true love of mine."  
  
Raziel let his burden collapse to the ground with a thunk-splat. On hearing this, Ishtar's tail fell into a loose coil while her wings folded tightly into her back. When her hooves touched the ground, it seemed as if her body suddenly remembered that it had weight and could not rest on the hair of her tail.   
  
"It seems your fatigue is short-lived," Raziel said.   
  
"That takes less effort than it looks," Ishtar said. "And really, I could have caught the girl myself."  
  
"The fact remains that you did not."  
  
"I would have, if you had not set out before I awoke." She knelt next to the corpse and felt for the corpse's neck. "But thank you."  
  
"We will require your strength."  
  
Ishtar's talons paused in the corpse's flesh. "Yes..." She tilted her head down. "More than you know."  
  
"What? This circumstance will not be met with an easy resolution?"  
  
Her smile was almost an apology. "Does it ever?"  
  
********************************************************  
  
Raziel twisted around until his back let out a satisfying crack. The grim excitement he always felt tingled through his flesh, but it was not the seething rush he had felt during his last encounter with Kain. Thinking too much of the future, perhaps. Or the fact that Ishtar seemed as untouched and impassive as ever.  
  
"The years have not been kind to this place," Ishtar said.  
  
Raziel turned his eyes to the ruins of Avernus. Perhaps "ruins" was too strong a word. It looked more like a field of mud pockmarked with pieces of stone that had once been the foundations of houses. He couldn't see how far the desolation lay; although the smokestacks could not hurl smoke this far from the pillars, natural clouds served to block the moon. Not a pleasing reward at the end of a long and gloomy journey, he reflected.  
  
"Though," Raziel said aloud, "they have not touched the cathedral."  
  
That building, at least, wasn't hard to make out. Thought its outer walls had long since fallen, Avernus Cathedral sstood as an angular silhouette in the darkness. Centuries ago, as Kain's lieutenant, Raziel had come here on a kind of pilgrimage. It was the holy place where Kain had found the Soul Reaver. Then, as now, it showed no sign of aging.  
  
Raziel turned to his daughter, who was picking mud off the edge of her wing. "Can you foresee what will come of this?"  
  
Ishtar lowered her wing, or made some movement- her ebony skin blended too well with the darkness. "Yes. And no. You will face a great enemy."  
  
For several moments, she did not continue.  
  
"I cannot see the outcome."  
  
He blinked at her, then gave a small shrug. "Ah, the only purpose served by destiny is to perplex those in the present. I will do without it."  
  
"Just you?"  
  
"I have already been killed by Kain. Between the two of us, only one can die."  
  
"I'll be alright."  
  
"Tempting destiny, are we?"  
  
"Raziel, I *will* be alright."  
  
He turned aside in case his glowing eyes betrayed a hint of amusement. "Very well. Kain will have to deal with two Razielim."  
  
But he had second thoughts when they entered the cathedral. It wasn't so much the fire-and-brimstone carvings on the walls, or that the torches were burning as if in welcome. More of a... presence? He glanced at Ishtar, and if he didn't know better he'd say she was agitated. Her tail undulated like an angry snake while her wings might as well have been flaps of stone attached to her back. Her head twitched in his direction; she knew he was looking at her. But her muscles remained tense.  
  
"I can go alone," Raziel said quietly.  
  
She slowly shook her head. "It's not that, Raziel." She hesitantly stpped toward a low doorway half-hidden in the shadows. Before he could reply she spoke again. "Through there."  
  
Blue light sprang onto the stone as the Soul Reaver coiled down Raziel's arm. It should be unsettling, to have such a powerful creature as Ishtar nervous at his side. So his mind insisted. He shoved the thought away without a hint of hesitation.  
  
The room was not the huge chamber he had anticipated, but a small closet that held only a single object: a platform colored orange and white and raised slightly off the floor. Raziel glanced at Ishtar, who stood silently in the low doorway, waiting. Kain would die, he reminded himself. The simple truth. Later he would consider his vampiric daughter.  
  
Raziel stepped onto the platform and the room blurred, then ran off his vision like water. He blinked and a different room formed around the platform, much dimmer and larger than the first, so the stone walls vanished overhead into darkness. He lifted his right arm so the light of the Soul Reaver cast the shadows farther back, but still he could not make out the ceiling.  
  
His footsteps echoed as Raziel stepped off the teleporter, whose soft glow died when he no longer touched it. The smell of brimstone filled the room, and Raziel again became aware of the barely-felt presence, but here it was heavy with malevolence.  
  
All this faded from his mind when the Soul Reaver illuminated something that was not made of stone. Something with white hair.  
  
"Kept waiting once again," Kain said. "Will you make a habit of this, Raziel?"  
  
Raziel raised the wraith blade. "Be assured it will not occur again."  
  
"I'm quite impressed. You're beginning to display the foresight of your daughter- even when she is wholly absent from your thoughts."  
  
Raziel cut him off with a vicious stab. In a blur he barely registered, Kain ducked aside and delivered a quick slash across Raziel's temple, tearing off a clump of dark blue hair. He smirked as if the blow was more to humiliate Raziel than damage him. Raziel turned with a backhand slash, but Kain had stepped out of the reach of the blade. His smile was infuriating.  
  
"Simply captivating. Regretfully, much as I admire the ardor you hold for your part, this is not how the play unfolds."  
  
Raziel saw the blade flying toward him and had time only to recognize it. Kain had used it against humans when he was in a lazy mood- it shaved off their skin and left behind nothing but a skinless corpse. Then it ripped into Raziel's flesh and he could not find the voice to scream. It tore through him, danced to one limb just as he registered pain in another, and stole breath he did not know he had. He fell to his knees and could not resist when Kain dug his claws into Raziel's hair and yanked his head backwards.  
  
"To have come all this way, boy, and not even listen to what your father has to say. Tsk tsk."  
  
Raziel's eyes flared. "Damn you."  
  
Having been robbed of the wraith blade, Raziel lashed out with his bare claws. Kain smiled indulgently as his son's talons scraped against his chest like wooden pegs against rock. The master vampire lifted Raziel by the hair and slammed his head into the wall. He did not speak until Raziel stopped struggling and glared into his eyes.  
  
"Perhaps you are not aware, Raziel, of the vast number of possibilities through which I have sifted to arrive at this moment. Your inflated indignation is merely one of the innumerable consequences. You cannot begin to conceive how many others I have wrought that you and I might convene at this moment. Yet you, in your feeble mewling for retribution, unwittingly undermine the purpose for which I have labored through millennia." Kain's grip tightened, straining Raziel's neck backward."Do show a glimmer of your former reasonableness."  
  
The soul reaver twisted his head until Kain could see all of his glaring white eyes. Whatever retort he had in mind, however, died in his throat as Ishtar stepped into view behind Kain. It was a rare moment where her eye sockets were staring directly into Raziel's.  
  
"I ask the same," she said. "Raziel, your future can take two paths. We can show you."  
  
Raziel dropped his glare from Kain to his daughter. "You would ally with him?"  
  
"We are axles on the same purgatorial wheel," Kain said, "of which you are the hub." He relinquished his grip and stepped backward toward Ishtar.  
  
Raziel flexed his claws. "Your riddles are trying, Kain."  
  
"Allow me to elucidate." Kain stepped backward again, sweeping his arm in a grand gesture. "You are the heir to the empire I have constructed. An unlikely savior to restore the balance of two stagnating worlds."  
  
"That is not elucidation."  
  
"The true explanation is much longer," Ishtar said. "To the beginning of our kind. If I may- there were two gods, long ago: the Elder God of the underworld, and the Younger God of the material world. We, vampires, are the creation of the Younger God, in his vain attempt to create something that would never fall into the realm of the Elder."  
  
Raziel managed to force himself to stop glaring at Kain. "An immortal."  
  
"Yes. For His pride, the Younger was imprisoned in a device meant to channel His energy without releasing Him." Ishtar gave him a significant look. "The Pillars. As a final mockery, they would be guarded by humans."  
  
"You are privy to all this?"  
  
"Of course. I have seen it, over and over. But back to your explanation... the pillars were never meant to be served by vampires. That defeated their purpose. When Kain became Guardian... I suppose you could say, the pillars began to leak, and the freed essence found a host in which to manifest itself. In you."  
  
"Your wings, Raziel," Kain said in answer to his incredulous look.  
  
"Ah yes." Raziel turned to Kain. "How could I forget."  
  
"-and without you, the Pillars needed a new... a new vessel, a host," Ishtar said. "So they looked to those with your blood."  
  
"They were so intent on possessing me?"  
  
"Yes, I don't know why. Perhaps they took a shine to you- or you answered a request."  
  
In his mind, the oroborus coiled around him in empty space. Raziel's eyes widened as the revelation slowly took shape- the dream, centuries and days ago, the snake that grew from the pillars.  
  
The one snake that devoured the other.  
  
Ishtar seemed not to notice his reaction. "The gift... was an unwelcome evolution," she was saying. "For some, it was a power barely contained within them. For many, it was an untamed force that destroyed them from the inside."  
  
"Much like the Turelim," Kain added helpfully. "Your divinity spreads like an infection."  
  
"All this is very engaging," Raziel said, "but I fail to see what it is you desire of me."  
  
"It is simple enough," Kain said. Raziel did not like his quiet smirk at all.  
  
Surprisingly, Kain did not seem to mind when Ishtar cut in. "Getting to that, Raziel. You might... have noticed that Nosgoth is not what you remember. Your execution had greater repercussions than you think."  
  
The narrowing of Raziel's eyes could have been mistaken for deep thought. It was less in reaction to what his daughter said and more to how she said it. Your execution. Barely a ripple in her tone.  
  
"And these would be?"  
  
"You have greater faculties of reason than this," Kain said with a note of disapproval.  
  
"Perhaps my faculties could be put to better use than deciphering your riddles."  
  
"Raziel," Ishtar cut in again. "The Younger God was part of you when you were thrown into the Abyss. Your death did more than leave us fatherless. It led to a greater disruption in His creation, which is all of the material world. Like the ancient murder of Ariel, doubled."  
  
"Can you imagine the fractures this generated in the empire?" Kain said. "We were to become demi-gods, each a solitary reflection of His greater ascendancy. With His passing from His creation, we were left like forsaken children on a path that held no objective. The clans degenerated into monstrosities for which the Younger would have no recognition."  
  
"And you conveniently evaded this degeneration?"  
  
"The role of a Pillar Guardian is, I find, a role of convenience."  
  
"To leave aside our tangents," Ishtar said, "suffice to say, Nosgoth is not in the best of states. The entire material world is dying, and the underworld is sick with hunger. Even the Elder God has met with the decay that strangles both worlds. There is no passage of souls from one realm to the other."  
  
"And, at last, we arrive at your role in this horribly mangled equation," Kain said. "There is not one soul in Nosgoth, in this world or the next, with the ability to salvage this land... except you."  
  
"What?" Raziel said.  
  
"Do abandon the façade of idiocy, Raziel, it is not fitting of a Dark God. You see, there is the dormant seed of the Younger God within your soul, and yet the wraith world is your natural home, and your physical body is merely a temporary shell which you can abandon at will. It is such a unique manifestation of both realms, and as such, the only fitting instrument for Nosgoth's salvation."  
  
"You wish me to become a god."  
  
"Essentially, yes."  
  
"You are mad."  
  
"Think, Raziel," Ishtar said. "Is it so hard to believe? What do you suppose I am, but a substitute for what you would have been?"  
  
Raziel turned a cold stare toward Kain. "If that is true, why did you execute me?"  
  
"Such eagerness to idenfity me as an indiscriminate killer. No, Raziel, there is a sound rationale behind my actions. Had you accepted the Younger God then, you would become His incarnation, greater than the combined powers of myself and your brothers. And the Elder would be greater still. The wasteland He would wreak is worse still than the corruption pervading this age, but His could not be rectified."  
  
The soul reaver had no more to say. The world Kain and Ishtar had abruptly thrust him into made no sense. He could find no words to defy them... only a growing sense of rage.   
  
"Quite an inspiring speech," Raziel said. "Spoken with the fervor of one who almost believes his own words. But as always, Kain, the delusional excuses you hurl about are hardly valid. You do not deceive me with your own desperate attempts to save your crumbling empire. I almost killed you once... could it be you fear a second attempt?"  
  
Kain had an unreadable expression. "You were fooled by a bit of silence I substituted for my 'soul'?" He laughed, his voice cold. "Did you fail to notice the disappearance of your Elder from your thoughts?"  
  
Kain turned his back and began walking toward the other end of the chamber. Raziel and Ishtar exchanged glances before slowly following.  
  
"Oh, I had speeches," the Emperor of Nosgoth said, his head half-turned to address those behind him. "The first time I foresaw you delivering that whining diatribe, I responded with my own, describing how every action you now condemn- your execution, the eradication of Clan Razielim- was calculated that this crucial moment may come to pass, to bring you to the cusp of godhood, surely the greatest offering a father could bestow upon his offspring. But, you would rather I make amends."  
  
Kain climbed a short stairway that led to a small ledge built against the wall. Only one object rested on the ledge: a black, crudely-carved coffin made of obsidian that shone in the dim light. He reached into the coffin and withdrew two white, stick-like objects, one in each hand. He turned, holding these gifts out to Raziel.  
  
Wingbones.  
  
"These are yours," Kain said.  
  
"You!... twisted dog...!"  
  
The ancient vampire descended the stairs, still holding out the wingbones. "This is not a poor attempt to mock you. Consume them, as if they were liberated souls. You will see."  
  
For a moment Raziel didn't move. When he did, it was to yank the cowl from his face with an angry tug.  
  
He could not have prepared for Kain's gift. The familiar spark rose from the wingbones like ethereal dust, but it was not green like the ordinary souls of vampires and humans. Rather than emitting light, the spark seemed to devour it. He hesitated before drawing the spark in, letting it feed his hunger.  
  
His muscles seemed to evaporate. He couldn't move or speak, only wait as something dark and strangely beautiful threaded through his body. It was familiar. It was the oroborus, he thought absurdly. It was the sudden itching and then tearing at his back as familiar bones grew again from his ruined body.  
  
Raziel turned his head. Ishtar was staring in his direction, a small smile on her blind face. He turned further and new-grown wings greeted his eyes. They were no longer the delicate appendages that Kain had destroyed. They looked more like a second set of arms, the skin a blue dark enough to be black, with a black membrane stretched between the widely-spaced fingers. He watched his right wing bend and straighten, thinking of the boneless flap that had been there moments before. It was so hard to think of as his own.  
  
Kain gripped his shoulder. "Only a piece, Raziel," he said, his perpetual scowl a touch softer than usual. "Think on what I have asked you."  
  
Raziel nodded at him numbly before turning to Ishtar. She had still not elected to use her sight. "Go on, my lord," she said with a soft smile.   
  
Without speaking, Raziel turned and left the cathedral to test his new wings. 


	11. Chapter Ten: The Gravity of Choice

*AI*  
  
Wow. After three weeks of absence, I still have reviewers! *backflip of joy*  
  
Lilith- Thanks for sticking around; I hope your stay in the vacuum wasn't too unpleasant. As for precociousness... yes! I shall take over the world when you are old and weak! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!   
  
AmuseMe- Yup, here's more of the story. ;) But I have a question- how did you get an Easter egg into any shape other than an egg? @_@  
  
MikotoTribal- As a matter of fact, I do plan on majoring in English. But that's some years ahead. ;) Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to work on making the prose clearer and easier to understand.  
  
*  
One more thanks to all those who stuck around, despite my period of unwritingness. :( As for the rest of you. *waves a copy of Patch Adams threateningly* Review or feel the wrath of an excessively sentimental Robin Williams!  
  
*/AI*  
  
10- The Gravity of Choice  
  
Ishtar listened as Raziel's soft footfalls faded and disappeared entirely with his teleportation to the top level of the cathedral. His wings would need to dry before he could take flight, but that would not take long. The blue blood that came from his body evaporated within moments.  
  
At the base of her spine, her muscles involuntarily shivered. It always came down to the wings.  
  
"I must say," her companion said nearby, "your part was magnificently played."  
  
"Hardly a part, Kain," she said. "Unless you mean my role as an impromptu mediator. Which, might I add, would have been much easier had you not taunted him at every turn."  
  
"Let it never be said that I am guilty of such a crime," Kain said. God, how nice it would have been to see that mocking smirk split down the middle.  
  
"Even if it is true," Ishtar said. She turned toward the teleporter and stepped slowly toward it.  
  
"Surely you do not mean to establish an interconnection in your darkening hours."  
  
She stopped and turned in the direction of his voice. "I have one more night."  
  
"Exactly."  
  
It silenced her, as Kain knew it would. The pause was too potent, too meaningful. Even without brushing the dark power inside her, she felt in the silence the void that had terrified her. They both knew her destiny... and the conclusion it would meet before the next dawn.  
  
"I will not hide," Ishtar said at last. "You and I have both seen what future this world will bring us. But you had power, the authority to grant or take the lives of thousands. And I." Her voice dropped. "I have wrestled with this power over centuries. And all I have done is watch and wait." She paused, and he said nothing. "I tire of idleness."  
  
When Kain spoke again, his voice sounded closer. "So," he said, "the full notion of sacrifice has finally occurred to you. One more instance of waiting is not much to ask."  
  
Ishtar's lip curled in an impatient sneer, exposing her unnaturally long fangs. "And what have you done that makes you so noble? Do you really think of it as a sacrifice to languish on your throne, trying desperately to think of new ways to pass the time?"  
  
"Do you think of it as simplicity itself to murder your firstborn?"  
  
Her drawn eyebrows slowly rose. When he spoke again, Kain's voice was on the verge of being sympathetic- no doubt the closest he had come in centuries.  
  
"All I ask, Ishtar, is that you spend this night with the full knowledge of what your actions will entail. Know what you will ask of him." He paused, and his voice took on a hard edge. "And know that I, too, am well-acquainted with sacrifice."  
  
"If you would not presume to dictate when I will suffer mine."  
  
The tension suddenly broke as Kain let out an appreciate chuckle. "Ah, it is reassuring to know that the father of such petulant wit will remain in this world even if we do not."  
  
"Yes... and I should like to use that wit while I may." Ishtar turned her back on him and shuffled toward the teleporter.  
  
"Very well, Ishtar. Enjoy your last hours. Perhaps then, the new world will be made more pleasant in your memory."  
  
Ishtar ignored him as best she could. That was the doubt that had plagued her when she first used the dark power, back when she could still see with her eyes. Her death had been the first thing she had foreseen, a muddled mosiac of blood and black wings. She had to talk to Raziel, somehow. Wouldn't that make it easier? She had to see those wings before...  
  
The chill that ran down her spine did not leave her until the cathedral was far behind.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Raziel couldn't help but laugh aloud as the night landscape whirled around him in a senseless blur. His wings cut circles into the air, propelling him through the sky in a wildly tilting flight that made his head spin. He swooped low, letting his hooves rush inches above the ground, before bringing his wings down in a powerful surge of movement that sent him lurching through the sky. Luckily the moon had emerged from the clouds, or he would not have been able to tell the difference between air and the ground.  
  
At last, Raziel tilted his wings so they brought him in a low swoop toward a ridge he saw below. His wings, tucked tightly to his sides, barely felt the fatigue of his long flight. They did, however, refuse to keep him balanced in the air. He had enough time to brace himself for the impact before he careened into the ridge in a splash of mud.  
  
The reaver of souls sat up with an effort. Well, he thought as he scraped a fistful of mud off his cowl. Perhaps I could use some practice.  
  
"Ha. I had forgotten the first difficulties of flight."  
  
Raziel turned. "Ishtar?"  
  
He saw his daughter standing nearby, her black skin almost luminous in the moonlight. She was smiling. "I thought I'd join you."  
  
"How did you reach this place?"  
  
"The same way as you." She sat down next to him, heedless of the mud that squelched around her body. "I flew."  
  
He cast a sidelong glance at her; apparently, her landing must have been much smoother. "It had not occurred to me that it would present such difficulties."  
  
"Indeed!" Ishtar laughed. "Well... I see you've done much thinking on Kain's proposal."  
  
Raziel removed another clump of mud. "No, I have not. I have instead discovered the surprising tedium brought on by intense introspection."  
  
"But how it passes the time."  
  
"Far more likely that it wastes time."  
  
"So... are you no closer to a decision?"  
  
His claws paused in the middle of removing more mud and hung still. "No," Raziel said quietly.  
  
They sat in silence, both preoccupied by their own thoughts.  
  
"...to think that was the game all along," Raziel said. He hesitated, his mind struggling to fit the elusive thoughts into words. "How many centuries has Kain spent in preparation for this absurd scheme? When he first stole upon the Sarafan tomb... did he hold the same intentions he does now?"  
  
"Not that long ago."  
  
Raziel nodded, strangely enough, in relief. "Undoubtedly you will find it simple to believe that... my mind accepts Kain as benevolent only with reluctance."   
  
"You are quite right, father." She leaned her head back on her shoulders, her eye sockets lit starkly by the moonlight. "But we are no masters of time, and time is against us. You cannot linger in indecision forever."  
  
"I do not intend to." Raziel felt the night slip from his senses as his mind turned to the past. "But did you watch, Ishtar?"  
  
Ishtar's tail flicked back and forth in the mud. "Yes. I saw. I have seen it over endlessly... How Rahab is the first to see you. How Kain flinches, even though he has foreseen your gift. Melchiah looks almost horrified at the prospect of wings... yes... he would have to skin birds to sustain himself." Her tail stopped. "But you are not proud. Evolved before your master, a gift as dramatic as wings... and you are not proud. That is why you draw back when Kain examines the new evolution. Melchiah's look changes... he has the fullest view of Kain's expression. In it, he sees what is to come."  
  
Ishtar bent forward, her wings forming a dome around her as if for protection. "My god, my god. Kain's eyes narrow. Could he think that, could he think that of his own son... who himself, is beginning to doubt what will come. My god! Claws on both wings...." Raziel could do nothing but look at her, watch her slowly sit up, claws curled in her lap, wings sagging. She turned in his direction, her features warped with pain.   
  
"And then the snapping sound..."  
  
The spell broke, and he became aware of the mud drying on his cowl. The reaver of souls lowered his head as if to catch his breath. Centuries, centuries, and still it was like yesterday.  
  
"I do not need my memory refreshed," he said.  
  
"It was not for your benefit." Ishtar exhaled and her wings fully relaxed. "Something with the power... ever since your resurrection, it has been, shall we say, unpredictable."  
  
"How?"  
  
"Well. Before, it could not exhaust itself. A good thing- I had nothing else to do for most of the night. Lately, though. It seems to take every opportunity to fizzle out. Almost as if it were *trying* to get away."  
  
"Do you think it can?"  
  
She turned away. "I don't know."  
  
"Ah. That would be a fine travesty, depriving my last offspring of all you have left. There is no reason not to fail my clan one last time."   
  
"Ohhh, Raziel, don't you understand." Ishtar cast a pitying look at his chest. "We were doomed from the beginning. In this future, the god-essence destroyed us when Kain did not. In the other future, where you did not grant the request of the pillars, the leaking of the pillars was indiscriminate. The effects would grip all the vampires of Nosgoth, wittling down our senses until finally destroying us. Whatever choice you made... our fate was already sealed."  
  
Raziel could barely contain the wave of half-anguished bitterness that swept over him. So Turel had been right. There was no meaning, not in his vampiric rebirth, not in the creation of his clan, not in his current misguided quest for revenge. Even Kain, of all the bastards in Nosgoth, had been right: the future had always been written. Every step of his had been predetermined from the beginning.   
  
"Such delight," he said. "If these are the 'pre-ordained paths' Kain is forever referring to, he and his sooth-saying compatriots are welcome to take all the space they need. I am done with them."  
  
Ishtar gave him a sad smile. "It is not that easy."  
  
"No. No, it can never be." Raziel leaned back with a frustrated sigh. It seemed he would spend the rest of existence running from a fate that refused to let him go. Not quite a comforting thought. "The prospect of dodging this prophecy or that cryptic mumbling for eternity is not quite to my liking."  
  
"You make godhood sound so tedious."  
  
"Perhaps... because it is? Not in the first years, I'd imagine. Too busy drunkenly reveling in the egotistical bliss of divinity. But the century after? Or the century following? Or the *endless* parade of millennia clambering by after that?"  
  
"Have you never learned to appreciate your immortality through all these years?"  
  
Raziel considered. "It had the illusion of significance." He paused, then shook his head. "No, I see it now as it truly was. There were scattered moments of appreciation for my prodigiously extended years. But surpassing those were the intolerable hours of boredom, a deadening monotony that forever clouded my endless existence. We called it the ennui of unquestionable dominance. No... it was the same soporific plague that even humans sense at the fading of their lives: the incurable tedium of a life that has lingered too long."  
  
"And you are not half the age of Kain..."  
  
"Perhaps boundless meddling and bombastic speeches delay the effects."  
  
Ishtar chuckled. "Ahh, you are too cynical. Certain lives are very, *very* hard to tire of."  
  
"Is that the case?"  
  
"It is. And fortunately, if all goes well at the end of our scheming, you will be the recipient of such a life."  
  
"What leads you to think it is any more fascinating?"  
  
"It is immortality. True immortality, Raziel, which is not as common as vampires believe. We can still be killed, by fire or water... Even you, if I may, my lord, are trapped in the shell of what had been mortal. The tedium stems from *limits*, what boundaries are imposed on us. If you should find the way out of the iron cage..." She leaned her head back and smiled blindly toward the moon. "Ah, you would not tire so easily."  
  
"Hm. I have my doubts."  
  
"Of course, you always do. But that won't change anything. Think of... the first moments of feeding, when you were a vampire. The blinding rush that felt as if you were propelled from your body. Take it, magnify it ten times over, and extend those first ecstatic moments into centuries- that is godhood." She chuckled to herself. "At least... that is a *taste* of mine."  
  
"Your enchantment is simply inspiring," he said drily.  
  
"I imagine it will be, when you can finally hear that depiction without doubting every word."  
  
They sat in companionable silence. Raziel glanced at her sidelong, watching as her claws idly toyed with the tail she had looped across her lap. It reminded him of standing at the edge of an ocean whose end he could not see, a black spiral whose center flared with restrained potency. She could have been ten feet tall- a hundred feet tall- and he would still get that sense of a condensed nugget of power burning at her core. It was both unsettling and oddly euphoric.  
  
The reaver of souls emerged from his preoccupation to find Ishtar looking toward him expectantly.   
  
"Hm?"  
  
"May I... see your wings?"  
  
"...can't you?"  
  
"Not eye-sight, no. The... Elder God will be most displeased with our actions, I'm afraid. I will have to save what power I can. I meant, Raziel, how the blind see."  
  
There was something terribly earnest in her voice, her manner, that Raziel found it difficult to even think of refusing. "If it is so tremendously significant..."  
  
Ishtar shifted her weight onto her knees. She was uncomfortably close, but again the same half-formed desperation kept him from protesting. Moments ago, the night had seemed tranquil enough. Now it was as if some horrible thought had occurred to her, something that filled her with quiet urgency. What had made the difference?  
  
Thought evaporated as he felt her claws on his wings. It was not the cursory examination Kain had given them moments before tearing them from his back, but a slow exploration, as Ishtar let her claws linger over his skin. The urgency faded, but the intensity did not; her face, though blind, was tight with concentration, as if she were memorizing the feel of his wing. He felt his muscles tremble involuntarily when her claws drifted to the bone... his body had not forgotten the old betrayal. But she stopped there until his wing calmed again, and only then did she move on, up to the scaly arms whose surface rolled with compact muscle. He looked up at his wing, at her claws gently exploring his wing, back to the intent expression on her face. She seemed to glow silver in the moonlight.  
  
Ishtar's claws drifted behind his back, at the point where his wings joined his shoulders, and stopped. She turned her head upward, her expression unreadable as her eye-sockets looked somewhere at his forehead. Raziel relaxed his wings, letting his flesh slacken beneath her claws. As if given permission, she moved up his back using his exposed spine as a guide. Her claws traveled over the cowl, tracing the back of his pointed ear while the other hand slid through his hair and down the back of his head. His neck tingled as he felt her move beneath his cowl and grab hold of it, slowly dragging the fabric from him and loosening it around his face. Raziel reached up and helped her unwind the cloth from around his head, and the air felt cold against his exposed flesh, but inexplicably welcome. Ishtar carefully laid the cowl on her lap with one hand while the other remained at its place against the back of his head. His eyes didn't move from her face as he felt her claws slide to the side of his head, her thumb tracing the hairless ridge of his brow. He closed his eyes and felt her thumbs lightly brush against his eyelids, then slide down the black markings that ran down from his eyes like tears. He felt her claws drift toward his mouth, her palms half on his skin and half in the empty space where his lower jaw had been. Here she stopped, her claws hesitantly caressing what was left of his cheeks.  
  
Ishtar bit her lower lip and let her arms fall into her lap. Raziel looked at her, dazed as if just awoken from a vivid dream.  
  
"Why," she said hoarsely, "you're beautiful."  
  
"As are you."  
  
He stared at her several moments, into the shadows gathering in her eye sockets. Then he turned, awkwardly ducking his head. The weight was so poorly balanced when half his throat was missing, he thought furiously. It was inconvenient. Hugely inconvenient, yes. Was his lower jaw somewhere on the floor of the Abyss? His mind ground to a halt. His head jerked up and he proceeded to memorize the look of the moon.  
  
"We should return," Raziel said without looking at her. "Already the sky grows light."  
  
Ishtar smiled faintly. "Yes." She held out the cowl, which Raziel took. "We should." She stood, turned from him, and walked a few steps away. He rewound the cowl around his head, concealing his incomplete facial features.  
  
Such a fragile moment, he thought vaguely. So easily shattered. But he couldn't be sure what exactly he was referring to.  
  
Neither of them said a word on their way back to the cathedral. 


	12. Chapter Eleven: Desolation

Blarghy blarghy blarghy! Five bah VladimirsAngel, pree knocky knocky quellis! Blee! (Subtitles: Thanks for the reviews! And Vladimirs Angel- *hugs* Hope you didn't read that all in one sitting! Blee!)  
  
Blarghsome... knee collar boo? Funkles bee! (Subtitles: Non-reviewers will be forced to watch What Dreams May Come in an endless loop!)  
  
*Peesome niles Mikoto {hahaha!}. Squiggy pigdy boodles, lalala Lilith shishkabob. Roonah!* (Subtitles: Thanks to Mikoto for the torture suggestion. {cackle} Will try to update more regularly, as Lilith showed her psychic self by noting that the Big Bang is coming... Enjoy!)  
  
11- Desolation  
  
Ishtar had been wrong, she realized as she winged blindly toward Avernus. She need only to look so far as Raziel's restless silence and her own familiar apprehension. It wasn't that she regretted flying out to meet him or preparing him for what was to come, in her own roundabout way. Kain, killjoy as he was, had reminded her of the worst consequences before she left.   
  
But I didn't care.   
  
She shook her head though she knew it to be true. There was no shame in searching solely for her own consolation. But she had found none. Of course not, what comfort could there be? What difference had it made to see the wings that would surround her as she died? It had changed nothing, and at the end of the whole mess that would follow over the next day, the same fate awaited her with the same leering grin. Remember me, dear lady? I'm still waiting.  
  
To that, her only defense was three blessed words: so be it.  
  
"Ishtar!"  
  
Ishtar stirred on hearing Raziel's voice and risked a flash of sight. They had reached the cathedral too soon. Not far off, she felt the presence of their enemy approaching. So many. My God, it is unfolding too fast. Her heart was heavy as she tilted her wings toward the ground.  
  
The vampire landed roughly, barely staying upright as she skidded across the ground. She thought she could feel the earth tremble beneath her hooves as they came closer and closer.  
  
"Hurry, Raziel."  
  
Raziel stepped up beside her. His landing must have been smoother than the one on the ridge. "Something unsettles you?"  
  
"Yes." Ishtar stumbled toward the cathedral entrance, too impatient to notice if she fell. "We have no more time. Hurry."  
  
There must have been something in her tone. Raziel's steps pounded at her side, then ahead. Ah, some unruffled corner of her mind noted, she would have to remember to keep all future warnings couched in panicked vagueness. It made him take notice.  
  
Inside the cathedral, his steps rang in the wrong direction and she stood still, eyelids peeled so far back she could feel the air moving in her sockets. "No," Ishtar said. She turned her head, blind, furiously reminding herself that she needed to save the power and not waste it on something as trivial as sight. "Kain- Raziel, where is Kain-"  
  
She felt his claws clasp her arm. "Ishtar. If some tremendous calamity approaches-"  
  
"No time for that, Raziel," Kain's voice said. Ishtar felt her wings sag with relief. "Your daughter and I are graced with the knowledge of all that is to come, but you, I'm afraid, will have to remain in the dark awhile longer." The buzz of a teleportation spell. When he spoke again, Nosgoth's emperor spoke from a few feet away. "I trust you will keep to these unfortunately deficient instructions. Go to the Sanctuary, Raziel. Consume the pillars as you consumed your own severed wings hours ago. When all preparations have been made, confront the fallen god at the edge of the Abyss. Above all else- do not enter the spectral world. In His realm, you are little more than a fly and He will dispose of you as thoughtlessly."  
  
"You propose that I leap into the Abyss and confront him underwater?"  
  
"No." It seemed Kain turned away. "He will come to you."  
  
"And where is our holy emperor during this titanic struggle?"  
  
Silence.  
  
Then the shrieks outside, the rumbling sound. Ishtar brushed the claws of one hand through her mane and fought a stirring of anxiety. It was happening, now. Centuries of watching it in the future had not prepared her for its occurrence in the present.  
  
Kain's steps walked away. "Rule with *integrity*, Raziel."  
  
Glass shattered, somewhere a stone wall clattered to the ground. The cathedral crawled with the creatures she had seen in nightmare. Sluagh formed writhing piles of green limbs against the walls. The porcupine-like creatures Raziel had first seen in the citadel lumbered through the doorways, leaving jagged holes in their wake. And behind them came the tentacled creatures with limbs that ended in spider-like claws and where they fell, the dirt itself rotted.  
  
Ishtar heard her father leap forward and give a shout of "Kain!" answered only by a cry of "Vae Victus!" and the shriek of the first Sluagh to die. She spun around, stumble-raced toward the warp gate that would save them. Behind her she heard Kain's grim command to go, the crashing of stone as more demons pushed their way into the cathedral. The ground shuddered beneath her hooves.  
  
"Raziel! This way!" Ishtar called. Couldn't tell if he heard. The crumbling cathedral was a chaotic mess of battle cries, none of which could be distinguished from the others. But she did hear the thud of paws landing in front of her, the guttural snarl of the demon eying its new prey. As if in answer, the black power inside her surged into dominance. Ishtar lost herself to the other that rose to battle its most hated enemies.  
  
Her hooves left the ground and with an electric clash that left her bones tingling, the gathered power rushed out. Pure energy split the air with black lightning. Her inner sight flashed and she saw the demon consumed by black flames. Her body jerked again and the lightning flashed in all directions. The walls, before crawling with the invaders, now twisted with walls of black fire. She saw the demons draw back before the blind darkness fell once again.  
  
Ishtar dropped to the ground, dazed by the sudden release from her trance. Hell. It would be twice as difficult to get to the warp gate with so many bodies on the ground.  
  
"Quite flashy, wasn't it?"  
  
Ishtar smiled in her father's direction, as best she could under the circumstances. "It worked, did it not?" She tripped and caught herself. "We need to get to the warp gate, second entrance on the left up ahead. This place is surrounded."  
  
"Then Kain-"  
  
"I have a feeling he'll be alright."  
  
"What a surprise." Raziel vanished from her side and somewhere to the right she heard the ravenous hum of the Soul Reaver cutting into its adversaries.  
  
Though at first repelled by Ishtar's show of force, the spectral creatures had doubled their assault against the cathedral's walls. At least the front entrance was guarded well... after all, Kain was there. And it was not his fate to die under the claws of an unholy mob.  
  
Ishtar's sight flashed and she dropped to a crouch. The tentacles of the attacking creature lashed harmlessly overhead. The vampire leaned back, hissing half from her own mind and half from the foreign spirit inside her. The energy force *had* been flashy. She would have to use a more conservation approach.  
  
Ishtar cupped her claws in the air as if clutching the creature's heart between them. She doubted it had one. She squeezed, willed the power to follow this less raging bend, almost grinned when it relented and burst from her in the familiar violent rush.   
  
She felt liquid splatter onto her body, the splash of water as it fell from the air. The resulting puddle was all that remained of her assailant. Ishtar turned toward her goal, wresting the energy from one opponent to many. The power unraveled them, twisted their flesh into a state of pure water. Her legs were wet up to her knees.  
  
"I see it!" Raziel called somewhere ahead.  
  
She nodded, but her voice refused to comply. It was too early to be exhausted. Of all the times for the attack to happen, it had to be the hour before dawn. She gritted her teeth, fighting off the daylight lethargy as much as she could. Her mind was still slightly dull with fog.  
  
Ishtar dropped to all fours and ran half-crouched toward the warp gate. It was too desperate to think she could run through the demons blocking her way. No choice but to plow. She reached for the power again and felt her body tingle with newfound energy and a new, mindless appetite for the battle.  
  
The vampire hurled herself at her enemies. Their talons slid off her or snagged in the energy coursing at the surface of her skin. But her claws ripped through them with hardly any effort on her part. Blood spurted or flew from the edges of her rapidly whirring claws. She ginned, in the grip of the frenzy, watching as Kain toppled all who attempted the front entrance and as she mutilated all betwen her and the warp gate.  
  
Then there were none. Her destination glowed just ahead and she ran toward it, her senses all drunk in carnage of her kills. But the edge dropped, the keenness of the cries and the blazing heat of the blood on her skin faded into ordinary sensations. Her eyelids flared open a moment before the blindness crashed over her.   
  
Ishtar stumbled.  
  
She caught herself, but she knew something was wrong. Raziel's warning shout slid over her, she could not comprehend it. The clawed tentacle of the demon behind her ripped through her skin, slid through the gush of blood that sprouted beneath its edge, and bludgeoned its way through her ribs. Dull sensations, really. But they forced a ragged scream through her throat, unrelenting as her body trembled with pain.  
  
The Razielim tried to turn, but the demon's claw had punched through her back and into the stone floor. It would not let her move without pain that choked her mind. She gasped, groped inside for the power that had failed her. The response was dim.  
  
The demon twisted its tentacle inside her and staying conscious was almost too much. The wound went numb with the supernatural poison it pumped into her. Her claws scrabbled at the stone, but she could not move.  
  
Just as it seemed the pain would send her exhausted mind spiralling into oblivion, defiance flared inside her. No. Not this way. Did she or the power decide? In the quiet center beneath the unending pain, they were one.  
  
Ishtar's claws stopped scrabbling and arched against the floor. There was a moment as she summoned the power, as the demon paused almost consideringly. What new antic would its prey perform?  
  
She lowered her head and energy burst from her weakening body. It traveled from her in a shockwave that burned its way into her victims' minds. She felt their thoughts, even the most primitive urges, shrivel like so much burning tinder against the onslaught of the power. Their minds shattered so gracefully.  
  
Ishtar shuddered again as the demon pulled its claws from her back. Her blood was so hot as it pattered on the stone. With the thought came the realization that she was dying. But it could not be, she had not seen it like this. As the deranged demons ripped into each other a few feet away, she lowered her cheek to the bloody floor and waited.  
  
Her father's claws closed on her shoulder. "-be damned! Ishtar?"  
  
Yes. Ishtar raised her head, barely conscious. Of course it did not end like this. "W... w..."  
  
Raziel lifted her beneath her arms and walked backwards, dragging her toward the portal. She felt the heat of her blood dripping down her skin. So much.  
  
"W... will..."  
  
"Death will not take you here." The soul reaver's snarl was almost feral. "This is not how it ends."  
  
She tried to shake her head but it would only droop. "Will... en... dorf..."  
  
Raziel's claws slightly relaxed around her. "Willendorf?"  
  
Ishtar's eyelids closed. Her mind could not summon the words to reply.  
  
She felt herself dragged onto the glowing green circle of the warp gate. With a great effort her mind sluggishly reached out, groping for the connection that would bring them to the Razielim home. She found it, but knew this only when Raziel told her of the symbol. A square in the middle of a shapeless block. Yes, that was it.  
  
They did not enter the portal at first. Instead, she heard the stone behind them come crashing down. The sounds of the battling demons grew faint, and Raziel said something about Turel's gift having a use after all.  
  
They entered the warp gate. Ishtar could not focus at all. Her grip slipped, and it took several moments of firm shaking before she became aware of Raziel again. He was asking where, where now.  
  
"L... l... left..."  
  
She felt him adjust her weight until he was fully carrying her. So much dead weight. His flesh was so cold.  
  
Raziel's steps quickened almost into a run, and he was no longer carrying her, and she was staring into a stream of blood. Ishtar blinked, the hunger and the weakness completely deafening her to the voice that spoke of the blood of ages. She let her head fall into the stream, felt the pure sweetness and primal bliss of the blood. It streamed into her weakening body, flowed and flowed until the strength returned and her wound closed, all traces of the poison gone. Her head reeled as she feebly pushed herself away, her mouth sticky and drawing tight as the blood dried.  
  
"Rest... we are... safe here... for now..." Raziel's claws hovering nearby as she lowered herself into a lying position. He said something, but she slipped away before she could hear. 


	13. Chapter Twelve: The Same As Ours

12- The Same As Ours  
  
Kain fought the compulsion to yawn as another Sluagh died under his blade. That would be, what, 212? 213? He had forgotten by now; the game had lost its shine around 46. It wasn't that he had grown tired of battle and the half-crazed bloodlust it wrought- far from it. But his demonic opponents were so mindless that the fray had all the excitement and variability of chopping wood. No doubt the Soul Reaver would have taken the edge off the monotony. Pity.  
  
The master vampire frowned in disapproval as one of the Sluagh broke free from the mob to swipe at his stomach. Its talons slid off with a raspy scrape. Kain smiled at it dispassionately, the same expression he would often use before dispatching a particularly bloody death. The talons of his free hand reached out and gouged into the Sluagh with the same detachment. Even when his arm snagged outwards at just the right length, even as he swung the Sluagh by its own bulbous eyeball before the nerves snapped and sent its maimed body spinning into the ranks of its comrades, Kain's movements came with the same apathetic precision.  
  
Although, the Sluagh's wails were unusually rich.  
  
Kain's amusement was short-lived. The screams of the one-eyed Sluagh faded beneath the cries of a hundred Sluagh, so many that even the mindless demons surrounding him glanced away to find its source. Nosgoth's emperor knew what was coming. He grimaced, edging towards the wall as the collective scream spread through the demons like a shockwave. So Ishtar had reached the warp gate. He had expected them to take much longer.  
  
Kain braced himself just before the swell of mental energy tumbled over him. He felt it like a tsunami slamming into his consciousness. He clutched his head, had a vague notion that the demonic screaming had reached its fever pitch, could not focus as forming even that simple thought seared his mind with pain. His eyes opened, to the sight of an endless sea of green limbs clawing at the air in search of relief. Then the pain died, passing as it had come, in a quick wave. He felt a certain rueful gratitude that the attack was not meant for him.  
  
He watched as the maddened demons turned upon each other in desperate frenzy. Yes, yes, he had seen it all before. That delightful breed of madness produced by Ishtar and her treacherous gift.  
  
But my God. How it was entertaining.  
  
The emperor of Nosgoth cast one last look at Avernus Cathedral. If the demons had not destroyed it during their initial assault, they would in the throes of their madness. Good-bye then, Avernus. To you and, perhaps, to the long dead shade of Azimuth, to whom we owe so much.  
  
Kain cast the teleportation spell and arrived within the rubble-strewn chamber just in time to see Ishtar's limp form vanish through the warp gate. His golden eyes watched her go, then turned to follow the trail of blood that led up to the gate. She would survive this battle, for better or for worse. And Raziel would endure the consequences of such. Tragic, really. But happiness was not the ultimate aim of fate. Let the human cattle delude themselves by imagining that things always worked out for the best. Fate was simply a storyteller delighting in high drama and melodramatic sentiments. Kain had long ago surrendered his ability to undo the skein of the story.  
  
He activated the warp gate and followed a different path than the one just traveled by his children. The halls of the abbey echoed as he stepped off the platform and dropped the iron sword that was now bright green with demon blood. Against the enemy he would soon face, such weapons were useless.  
  
Kain teleported again, this time to a chamber deep inside the abbey. Somehow the Rahabim had repaired the windows at the edges of the room. Kain glanced at the platforms nearby, then at the water that filled the room nearly to its ceiling. A single bubble rose to the surface and soundlessly popped.  
  
The master vampire crossed his arms over his chest. "Dachlin."  
  
A sinuous shape rippled beneath the water. Slowly it rose to the surface, revealing the shark-like head of Rahab's firstborn. Kain noticed the thin red plumes that had followed the Rahabim's fangs in the water. "Master."  
  
"Have you prepared adequately for your assigned task?"  
  
"We have, master."  
  
"Then you have until nightfall to see it completed."  
  
Dachlin's head tilted slightly, but he nodded. "Yes, master."  
  
Kain smiled. "Good boy."  
  
The vampire lord teleported back to the warp gate, the smile fading into a neutral grimace. He had the other clans to gather, to lead in the last conquest of his reign. Oh yes, he would lead them all, all the bastardized and hopelessly corrupted progeny of this age. He would lead his children to their deaths and call it one last sacrifice. Let the old world die with him, let the ashes of this empire vanish as if it had never been. Even the earth, blighted all these centuries, would heal and forget.  
  
Tragic, really.  
  
Kain sighed, resumed his role, and continued with the next act.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Ishtar lay beside the blood fountain, exhausted but alive, and did not stir. She must not have heard him. Raziel turned away and figured it was for the best.  
  
That had come far too close.  
  
The reaver of souls stared down the hall to the warpgate that had borne them from Avernus. Its glowing green circle had nearly turned red with blood. He looked down at his own claws, then at the cowl whose white markings had been stained brown. There was so much. For the first time in more than a thousand years, the former vampire felt a glimmer of loathing for the gift. The blood of his own child had spilled on his claws and mingled with the blood of demons. It stirred within him some primal anger, a ferocious hatred that had lain dormant even when he had first encountered Kain hours after his awakening in the underworld. This was a much more patient anger. If it had to, it would wait.  
  
Raziel scraped some of the dried blood off his claws and surveyed his surroundings. Even during his vampiric unlife, he had never had reason to journey to Willendorf- the lake surrounding the island-city was deterrence enough for Kain's brood. Yet, why had Ishtar urged him to come here? The blood fountain, of course, but... she must have been to this place before. Otherwise, they would not have had access to the warpgate.  
  
The fallen clan lord glanced at Ishtar's unconscious form and quickly looked away. She needed her rest, and he needed to pass the time until nightfall. Getting a look around couldn't hurt.  
  
Only one other passage led away from the warpgate, and Raziel set down this corridor. Even the spiders had abandoned this place. It stank of dust and stale air.  
  
Raziel's explorations soon revealed them to be in tunnels built into the side of a mountain outside the city. Small wonder; the citizens would not have looked kindly to the placement of a blood fountain within their walls. Not that there were any citizens left to complain. The city of Willendorf had not fared well through the centuries, but unlike Avernus, some of its stone buildings had remained. The soul reaver's gaze looked to the remnants of a castle whose worn-down towers still looked imposing against the pre-dawn sky. No doubt this was the castle of King Ottmar, a man depicted in Kain's boastings as a whimpering coward with no rights to his kingdom. With little else to do, and confident that the ruins posed no threat to his slumbering daughter, Raziel set out to explore the crumbling castle.  
  
Once inside, though, the ruins weren't so enthralling after all. It was little more than a heap of stones set in symmetrical shapes- anything of interest had long since rotted away. Raziel walked through the castle's halls with something akin to disappointment. If there was anything that could utterly repulse him, it was the idea of waiting with nothing to do.  
  
A blur on the opposite wall caught his eye, and Raziel idly crossed what might have been a banquet hall. His eyes were fixed on the only patch of color he had seen so far. Close enough, anyway: it was rust-red, the color of-  
  
He abruptly stopped, white eyes huge. On the wall, in blood or paint that had not yet cracked or faded, was painted the symbol of clan Razielim.  
  
...couldn't be...?  
  
Raziel turned toward the doorway nearest to the wall marking and ran. Let it be true. And the room he entered was testament that once, it had been. His eyes tried to take it in all at once: on the wall, a decorative staff that ended in two pointed prongs and bore the Razielim symbol. A small set of yellowed books on top of a crudely-carved, collapsing shelf. An ornate chest of tarnished brass. Overhead, the clan-flag of the Razielim, its cloth still a vibrant red and protected from the elements that would have weathered it to gray.   
  
The soul reaver hobbled to the center of the room and fell to his knees. The revelation was too immense to comprehend at once, though it could be summarized with few words: some had survived. Hadn't Ishtar told him? Yes. That first conversation in the petrified forest, before the Turelim had interrupted. "In a keep far to the southeast." How could he not have guessed? The southeast was a wasteland... but for Avernus and Willendorf, the ancient cities. Of course, the Razielim would have come here.  
  
But they were gone, even here. Even where they were supposed to have survived.  
  
Raziel brushed his claws along the brass chest, watching the edge scrape roughly against the tarnish. A piece of the corroded metal gave way, falling into the chest and inside he glimpsed armor, the animal-shaped top of a ceramic jar, the spine-like rope of a beaded necklace. He looked away. The spines of the books were still readable. One read, in gold-leaf script, "The Dumahim and the Prince of Donkeys."  
  
Kain's firstborn son lowered his forehead to his knees.  
  
And for the first time, the shard of the dark power that joined him with his wings sprang to life. When he opened his glowing eyes, he saw through time.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Strane looked exhausted. His golden eyes stared glazed and half-closed into space, and blood-sweat gathered like tiny red orbs on the skin of his forehead. He could not falter. His claws closed around the arm of the long-dead corpse laid in front of him as if to keep his own body from blowing away. His fanged grimace spoke of how much energy he was pouring into the spell.  
  
Nearby, Morek shifted his weight from one hoof to the other nervously, watching as the clan's oldest survivor teetered on the edge of exhaustion. At times, it seemed Morek would crush the ceramic jar in his claws from nervousness. But he would not intervene. All the clan members knew how important this was. If Strane failed to spawn a new fledgeling... Morek shook the thought away and thrust the ceramic jar under Strane's nose.  
  
Strane's eyes flared into a sharp glare. "Save it... for the fledgeling." Barely a gasp. But the smell of the blood in the jar had helped rouse him.  
  
"Don't drink, and there won't be a fledgeling," Morek said.  
  
Strane hissed but his eyes had unfocused again. For better or for worse, the younger vampire sensed that the spell was coming to a close. He swallowed, claws tight against the jar, and waited.  
  
Strane doubled over the corpse, his breath coming in frenzied gasps. Morek shuffled backwards and watched with panicked eyes. What would he tell the clan-?  
  
The older vampire rested his palms on the floor, now stretched over the corpse. The sweat poured in bloody rivers down his face, dripping between his parted black lips. His hair was matted with clots of his own blood. But his upper lip curled defiantly even while his lungs shook with ragged breaths. For the clan, for the clan. Find the soul, drag it back, prove that the fatherless Razielim had more to do than sit in their keep and wait to fade away. For the clan-  
  
Strane choked and nearly fell backwards as a piece of his own soul tore itself free. It was like vomiting razors. The spark fell from him, cautiously perched on the skin of the woman's corpse. He leaned back on his elbows, barely managing to keep his eyes focused on the body, and was aware of Morek's shuffling hooves nearby. Waited.  
  
The woman's back arched as the reanimated corpse drew its first breath.  
  
"Yes..." Morek whispered.  
  
"Yes," Strane said, his voice weary. The bloodied vampire leaned forward, brushing back the woman's long black hair. His fledgeling had stopped breathing, as was normal when the new vampire realized the function was no longer necessary. Her entire body shivered, and her half-rotted arm shakily rose to her chest, where three slash-marks were beginning to close.  
  
"It's alright," Strane said. The fledgeling's eyelids flickered rapidly, and he smoothed her hair again. "It's alright," he repeated, and her body stilled. Strane smiled and took the jar that Morek handed to him. Not his prime choice for the fledgeling's first meal, but it had to do. He had not fully expected to succeed.  
  
"You did it." Morek grinned stupidly. "You... we... can-"  
  
"Yes," Strane said. He was so tired. He let the fledgeling smell the blood, smiled and smoothed her hair when her mouth opened like an expectant baby bird. "Ah, daughter, you cannot imagine what joy you have brought us all." He smiled again as he tilted the jar to her lips and she began to feed. "My little Ishtar."  
  
********************************************************  
  
Raziel found himself in the same room, now derelict and abandoned. The vision was so dreamlike- vivid as anything he had experienced while it was occurring, and dimly-remembered once it had passed. He slowly rose to his feet and glanced out the crumbling window. The sun would rise within the hour. He thought of Ishtar sleeping, Ishtar being born to the Razielim survivors.  
  
He left the room. The soul reaver sensed, inside, that searching for further evidence of his clan would be futile. There had not been very many, and they had not left much of a mark, not even in the castle they had taken as their home.  
  
And yet... how could he not try?  
  
The day saw Raziel prowling the remains of the castle and wandering the ruins of the streets in search of further signs from his clan. As he had anticipated, the search was largely in vain. For all he could tell, they had simply vanished.  
  
One other object of interest was found, when the sun was fading into the west, beneath a well-preserved building whose markings distinguished it as a fortress of the Sarafan. As were all the buildings on the outside, this one was bleached colorless by the elements. But the inside of this structure was another matter entirely.  
  
Raziel knew it when he saw the faint gleam emanating from somewhere at the end of the staircase that led into the ground. He tilted his head as his steps carried him down- the air here was just as stale as the rest of the ruined city. The light could not be coming from torches.  
  
The soul reaver stepped from the staircase and into what looked like an imitation cavern. The room held nothing but man-made stalagmites that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. At the middle section of each stalagmite, where its width was thinnest, the stone ended. In its place were bars of light forming a glowing cylinder that connected the top of the structure to the bottom. When he came closer, Raziel saw that they were not bars of light- they were glyphs, forming a cylindrical cage in the middle of each stalagmite.  
  
He stared at the bizarre structures for several moments, one eyebrow quirking and falling into place again. The room was huge and contained nothing but rows and rows of these edifices. Clearly, a powerful magic radiated from each one- ages after the time of the Sarafan, age had barely touched these.  
  
Then, faintly, he heard the familiar buzzing of a soul untethered from its body. He tilted his head, and realized he had been wrong. It was not one soul, but many. Very many.  
  
Realization slowly dawned on him. He looked again at the rows of glyphcs, ignoring, for the moment, the soul he could barely see imprisoned within them. One glyph he recognize, the most prominent of all: the symbol for fire.  
  
Raziel backed away to stare at the endless rows of these miniature, man-made hells. More clearly now he heard the captive souls, twisting in agony as they had since the time of the Sarafan more than a thousand years ago. And beyond that, the echo of his own words: "The Sarafan were saviors, defending Nosgoth from the corruption that we represent."  
  
A sickening feeling welled up where his stomach had been. He ascended the stairs much more quickly than he had descended them.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Ishtar woke with the smell of blood in her nostrils. But she barely noticed, despite the hunger it stirred inside. She awoke also to the sight of the stones in front of her.   
  
She sat up, fully healed from the wounds of the night before, and turned her head. Her sight moved with her. Try as she might, she could not disable the gift; for once the dark power could not be exhausted. As if eager for the night ahead, it blazed up and down her being, giving her the eerie feeling that she was burning from the inside out.  
  
The last sign, then, Ishtar thought. The final twist of the knife.   
  
The vampire waited patiently, then stood. A moment later, Raziel appeared from around the corner.  
  
"Are you ready?" Ishtar said.  
  
"That was my question to pose." He looked away as if preoccupied. But she understood. "Are you... alright?"  
  
"It was nothing a good day's sleep couldn't cure." She leaned backward until her spine cracked to emphasize the point. "And now... I do believe we have a grand finale to perform."  
  
"Would it be so difficult to phrase that sentiment in less fatalistic terms?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"A shame."  
  
Ishtar smirked, let it fade when she noticed her own bloodstains on Raziel's cowl. The fatalistic saw omens all around.  
  
With nothing left to say and no preparations left to conduct, they walked toward the warpgate that would take them to the pillars.   
  
********************************************************  
  
*AI*  
  
A big welcome to Silmuen, a big welcome-back to Mana Angel, and a big chocolate bar to VladimirsAngel for reading all that in (kind of) one sitting!  
  
This is just to say that the next update may be slightly delayed. I have about... 30 pages of reports/papers/response journals to write for this bizarre, sadomasochistic ritual that they call Finals Time, so all the worthwhile things in life have been pushed down the priorities list for now. :\ Also, I figured I should post the Big Bang in one fell swoop, since it spans more than one chapter. Not doing so would be the cliffhanger of cliffhangers... and I already learned my lesson when it comes to that. *covers eyes*   
  
Thanks for putting up with me. ;) Till next time...  
  
*/AI* 


	14. Chapter Thirteen: The Finishing Move

Didja miss me? ;) A few days ago I was hired for my first ever paying job as a writer. I thought it would be auspicious to finish old projects before moving on to others. So here we go, after Goddess knows how long, the conclusion of Scattered Ashes!  
  
Note: the epilogue will be up within the next three days.  
  
13- The Finishing Move  
  
As Raziel stepped through the warpgate, a strange tingling rushed from his wings and through his shattered body. His steps nearly faltered and he touched his claws to his head, overwhelmed with- impossible to describe. Conclusion? The moment before a freefall? Some vast apex had somehow arrived at his feet, and it was as if he had spent hours climbing a mountain and just now looked down. Of its own volition, the Soul Reaver half-manifested on his arm, sending a spiral of light along his flesh. The coiling of the blade brought him back to awareness.   
  
He stood next to his daughter as the warpgate's glow faded, and the symbol of a spiral loomed above their heads. He noticed Ishtar looking intently at it. Apparently, she no longer cared how reckless she was with the power.   
  
Raziel's spine tingled. Who knew. She seemed different now, almost on fire.  
  
"You'll have to excuse me," Ishtar said, "if I don't accompany you to the pillars."  
  
"Ah," Raziel said with an air of resignation, "another clandestine errand? I would have guessed. And of course, it would be an impossibility to acquaint me with its nature?"  
  
"I'd hope not," she said with a touch of pique. "But why don't I show you." The eyeless vampire stepped away from the warpgate and strode down the hall to the chamber's door. Yes, she kept her sight. He would have to ask her how it worked, once all this was over.  
  
A brief tingling in his left wing intensified into a light burn, then faded away.  
  
"Now," Ishtar said, "do try to control yourself."  
  
Raziel's only answer was his raised eyebrow.  
  
"Just believe me."  
  
She swung the door open, and immediately Raziel heard the hissing of the devolved vampires. No wonder the Soul Reaver had willed itself into being. He lowered the blade, his stance wary. Ishtar could defend herself, so let them try-  
  
"Control... yourself."  
  
She stepped just outside the doorway, one arm swept back to hold the door open for him. Hooves shuffled, but nothing attacked. Ishtar looked on with the same expectant patience.   
  
Raziel let his muscles relax. Another game. For being his daughter, she was too much like Kain for his tastes. He stepped through the door, met the red-eyed gaze of a Dumahim with bared teeth. He felt the Reaver's hunger as his own, and it was just barely in check. It only grew as his eyes surveyed the crowd of vampires now staring at him with hatred they didn't bother to hide. Gods. They clogged the path; there were hundreds.   
  
"What is this?"  
  
The door swung shut behind him and Ishtar's arm fell to her side. "Think of it as a shift of alliance."  
  
"With these debauched creatures?"  
  
"What would be more fitting?"   
  
Raziel's eyes half-shut. That was Kain's voice. Why was he not surprised...  
  
The lesser vampire scuttled out of the vampire lord's path. The emperor had an eager, hungry look that the reaver of souls had not seen in ages. "Like the sickeningly obedient servants they are, they will follow their-" -here he made a lazy wave of his claws- "beloved patriarch into perils from which they will not emerge."  
  
"This is a poor time to pamper your ego, Kain."  
  
"I wasn't referring to myself..." Kain mock-bowed at him with a leering grin. "...my dear firstborn."  
  
"At any rate," Ishtar said, directing an eyeless glare at Kain, "we will ensure you are not interrupted."  
  
"We meaning this herd of degenerates?"  
  
Kain made a sound of disgust and looked toward the sky, arms crossed over his chest. "Such a lack of foresight... no, Raziel, tonight all the clans of Nosgoth will be working to ensure *your* success."  
  
"All six," Ishtar added, her claws curling at her side.   
  
"Well." Raziel cast a dry look at his progenitor. "You flatter me. And to think, at Avernus you spoke as if we would never meet again."  
  
"You should have known better." Kain turned away, toward the path that led to the Abyss. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a godly confrontation to initiate." He nodded imperiously at the Dumahim, then cast the teleportation spell and disappeared.  
  
Ishtar exhaled, closing her eyelids for a moment. "Go on," she said. "I'll join you when there is a lull in the battle."  
  
Raziel nodded and forced the Reaver into dormancy. He wouldn't need it just yet. "Take... care."  
  
"Of course."  
  
The Dumahim parted to let him pass. It was not long until he reached the Sanctuary of the Clans.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Ishtar waited to follow him until he reached the Sanctuary. It must have been mildly shocking, seeing the huge double doors reduced to a puddle of metallic sludge. A good thing Kain had remembered that detail. They could not chance Raziel entering the spectral world.  
  
The winged vampire walked toward the Sanctuary, and the Dumahim crowded farther from her than they had for Kain. It was terribly laughable. She was rather glad that she had no responsiblity to order them around. That was Kain's task, though he had done little more than give them an area and tell them to defend it. At this stage of their devolution, however, it was unlikely they had the capacity to understand more complicated orders.   
  
The crowd thinned as she neared the Sanctuary until she saw the grassless hills, free of vampires, rolling up to the building's base. It had been magnificent. It was still, even if its former glory had faded, but it was a different majesty that shown through the ancient rock. The building had endured much. She saw it in the six faded clan banners that frayed at their ends and, in the central tower that dissolved into the mist high above, in the two giant torches that saw more rain than fire.  
  
Raziel's last child looked on all this, feeling much like a pebble set next to a mountain. "Look upon my works, ye mighty," she whispered, "and despair..."  
  
The veil was approaching, that point where the forces of the universe changed due to Raziel's momentous decision. At last, here was a fate she could not foretell. The Sanctuary still stood at the falling of the veil. Beyond that point, the future was as unforseeable as it was for mortals.  
  
But the present was still open to her. The Abyss crawled with spectral creatures emerging into the physical realm. The entire Rahabim clan had gathered to stop them. The waterfalls swarmed with moving figures and, in some places, flowed in a thick red and green sludge. Some demons managed to reach land, where the other clans immediately set upon them. There were so many, on both sides.   
  
Ishtar looked into the Abbey with its still waters, the Silenced Cathedral and its pipes stuck full with spiderwebs. They had been deserted. The human citadel stood just as empty, except for the occasional half-mad survivor stumbling through the ruins. The moment of inconceivable change had come. She almost felt the earth holding its breath.  
  
The vampire turned just in time to face the wave of Turelim tearing into the Dumahim ranks. The first of them trotted cackling toward the Sanctuary, moving on all fours like dogs. Ishtar smiled faintly. They'd come to play their part as well. If only Turel could see them now.  
  
Ishtar spread her wings and the dark power rose within her, rising within her in a relentless spiral. She rose into the air, staring into the smoke-filled skies and at the same time watching the Turelim come running towards her. The power kept building, even after the point when it should have released. Blue sparks flickered on the rocky ground and burst into life. Over her head, a blue-flame oroborus flared into blinding brilliance.  
  
The power built and it overwhelmed her. She needed more, only a little. Ishtar shut her eyelids. This was her last battle. She would make it count.  
  
The Razielim raised her arms and every hill burst into blue fire. The flames rose in twisting pillars, joining with others until a wave of fire rushed down from Ishtar and crashed into the Turelim. The flame of the Dark God destroyed them as no ordinary flame could, unmaking them as if tearing through sheets of silk. Even their ashes dissolved in the inferno.  
  
Ishtar sighed with the power's release. But it did not leave her. It would not now that Raziel was so close, and as long as she protected him, she had no doubt that it would not be exhausted.  
  
Very well, she thought. Make it count.  
  
The vampire flung her head back and the air drew her up, suspending her between pillars of blue fire beneath the oroborus. Above her, for the first time in centuries, the giant torches at the top of the Sanctuary burst into flame. Her body shuddered as the power channeled through her, rich and limitless. It was worth it, she thought. All of it.  
  
Her mind faded, submerged beneath the overpowering tide of the Younger God.  
  
********************************************************  
  
The reaver of souls staggered upright. There. Consuming the pillars was not as simple as it seemed. It felt as if a swarm of insects scuttled through his veins, trying to gnaw their way free. He stumbled blindly toward the Pillar of Balance, the last and only one left. When he had consumed the others, they had simply vanished, leaving only empty air behind.  
  
Soon the burning sensation tapered off, and Raziel leaned thankfully against the Pillar of Balance. Now he saw why Kain and Ishtar had created such a stalwart defense- the addition of every pillar felt akin to tearing down his mind and rebuilding it again.  
  
Now there was only one left.  
  
Raziel brushed his claws along the throne Kain had built around his charge. No doubt consuming pillar would kill its guardian as well. It was childishly pleasing to know he would bring about Kain's death after all.  
  
"Oh, little soul." The familiar voice stopped him. "You know not what you bring upon us..."  
  
The reaver of souls turned. Ariel, the former Balance Guardian, regarded him with one transparent blue eye. The other half of her face presented only an eyeless skull looking blankly back at him.  
  
"No, Ariel, I am only too aware."  
  
The spirit looked away, her ephemeral hands clenched into fists. "Would you blind yourself so well? Can't you see what it is you have become?"  
  
"The change is quite visible." Raziel unfurled his wings and indicated them with a wave of his claws. "A beneficial enhancement."  
  
Ariel drifted backwards, eyes closed. "I told you Ariel remembers what others have forgotten... and what I see is no benefit of yours."  
  
"To each his own."  
  
"Raziel, he has *ensnared* you!" She came closer, her hands making a begging motion. "The cycle of history cannot endure this forever. The world has seen too much sport made of corruption and decay."  
  
"Ah, I will craft a uptopia for your express pleasure."  
  
One blue eye narrowed, but the skull remained expressionless. "May your empire build nothing more than a city of rats and dust."  
  
Not optimistic, that. But the wraith had uttered so many riddles, he no longer cared to understand their meaning. "I trust you know what follows."  
  
Ariel said nothing.  
  
She floated in place, and Raziel raised the Reaver in the air, poised to slam it into her. He thought he saw her flinch. Then the wraith blade met Ariel in a shattering of light and energy. Sparks erupted and fizzled out, and Raziel's arm shook with the impact. Behind the sound of the Reaver claiming the ghost, he thought he heard her scream.  
  
And quite suddenly it was over. Ariel was gone. Instead there was the Reaver, humming with satisfaction and now a glowing yellow-white.  
  
Raziel lowered his newly-imbued weapon. The stirring of the Dark God strengthened within him, and the present slowly open to his sight. He had seen this before, he thought suddenly. A foreign thought from the growing power. There was much to do now. With Ariel gone, only the Pillar of Balance itself remained.  
  
The imbued Soul Reaver flashed once as if in protest, but it was gone before he could be sure.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Outside the walls of the Sanctuary, Ishtar dropped to one knee in exhaustion. The rocky terrain around her was covered with soot and scorch marks, which were the only evidence that scores of demons and Turelim had tried to push their way through. And, she thought with a tired smile, not one had passed through the massive doorway behind her. The sight was beginning to falter, but it no longer pained her to think of it.  
  
Only one more errand and, finally, rest.  
  
The winged vampire waited patiently, just as she had outside the citadel days ago. No rush. But it was still a relief to hear the soft buzz of a teleportation spell at work. Ishtar's wings drooped with released tension.  
  
"Well," she said.  
  
The power brought her a hazy image of Kain smirking. "This has been a ravishing performance, my lady."  
  
"My pleasure."  
  
"Here. Accept this as a token of my appreciation." An image of the gift flashed in her mind, and her tail flapped against the ground. "Or, shall we call it a parting gift?"  
  
"Thank you," she said flatly, accepting it as he handed it to her. "It will be... useful, I am sure."  
  
"Of course it will."  
  
"And I hope you schedule your own departure with as much enthusiasm."  
  
Kain seemed unperturbed. "It would be poor form to complete the drama with a whimper."  
  
Ishtar nodded. How he could be so cheerful about his imminent demise, she could probably never understand. But in his own way, Kain was almost reassuring.  
  
Though probably not on purpose.  
  
"Good luck to you, Kain," Ishtar said.  
  
"If it pleases you to say so."  
  
She heard the buzz of the teleportation spell and knew that Kain had gone. Trust him to think of everything, she thought, gripping his gift in one hand. Her steps, though weary, were confident as she turned and walked into the Sanctuary. 


	15. Chapter Fourteen: Sacrifice

14- Sacrifice  
  
The soul reaver gazed up at the final pillar. It stood alone- not even rubble marked the existence of the other eight. He had not been able to imagine the Pillar of Balance without immediately seeing its supports, and the sight was both pitiful and unreal. As the power blossomed in his mind, pushing the boundaries of his consciousness utnil it seemed to encompass all things, Raziel thought he saw a flicker of what the pillar had been... something even greater than the monument of his dream. History in its roiling vastness lay mapped and charted before him.  
  
Raziel laid his claws on the black throne built around the pillar's base, his burning eyes still fixed on what had once been the center of all life in the physical world. Interesting, he almost felt reverent.  
  
"I would wait for that."  
  
He saw Ishtar emerge from the doorway before his eyes found her. "For enjoying history before it is extinguished?"  
  
The vampire ascended the stairs to the raised platform, not quite joining her father. "For the extinguishing."  
  
"Yes... Kain will want to savor the melodrama."  
  
"Give him time." Her rat-like tail gathered in a coil at her feet. "It will not be long."  
  
She was so much like Kain. Her words had the same affected air of regret that he had mastered.  
  
Raziel turned to fully face her, his eyes settling on the decorative staff she held. It was from their territory, that much he could tell by the shape- thin until the top, which widened to form two thick horns. A small bronze emblem bore the clan Razielim symbol. "I would have thought you had outgrown that toy." At her blank look, he nodded toward the staff.  
  
"Ah. Yes..." Ishtar ran her claws along the staff's length, one black wing curling around it. Her eyelids ceased to blink over her empty sockets. "It-" Her head snapped toward him. "Tell me of your reign. Tell me what you plan to do after all this."  
  
Raziel raised a hairless eyebrow at the sudden change.  
  
"Tell me. Please."  
  
"You do not think contriving a course to be premature?"  
  
Her grip on the staff tightened. "Raziel."  
  
It was the terrible earnestness he had seen at the cathedral. Was he doomed to forever guess what passed his daughter's mind? Was it something she feared now, or after the battle had been won?  
  
"I would- will-" Raziel paused. "...make manifest the higher possibilities of vampirism. I will disentangle the webs of Kain's contamination and unfold what we might have been."  
  
"What is that?"  
  
"You. The new vampires are to be born in your image." He said it as the thought came to him, but feeling went into the words. Only days ago it would have been different. But the man-made hell of the Sarafan- ah, that had changed so much, so much.  
  
Ishtar leaned her forehead against the staff. "Then that is the new world." Her voice was quiet, dim. "Vampires and their vampire god." Her eyelids closed, and she nodded to herself. As if taking strength from that, her back straightened and the staff tilted loosely in her grasp. "Raziel, I believe I have a promise to fulfill."  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"To tell you the story of our clan. In a way that makes sense," Ishtar added with a small smile.  
  
"Surely-"  
  
"No, it can't wait. Oh, I am sorry. But the Pillar of Time is gone, as is time itself. We have none, you see. So this cannot wait."  
  
"Your riddles are less decipherable than Kain's."  
  
A small dot of light appeared in each of Ishtar's eye sockets. The flesh inside looked blue. "But you will understand mine, Raziel...  
  
"We knew what had happened when you did not come back. Cidyr took your place as ruler of the clan. He helped us gather humans without straying too far from the walls... but we had nothing to be afraid of. When the other clans saw us, they ran as if we carried a vampiric plague.  
  
"We followed Cidyr even when his own wings sprouted- one from his back, the other from his skull. We followed him even as we watched him go mad."  
  
Raziel's voice dropped. "This is hardly the time for macabre histories."  
  
Now he could make out the light in Ishtar's eyes- blue fire, disembodied, suspended in the shape of a ring. "It cannot. The entire clan descended into madness and their bodies twisted into grotesque shapes. Strane gathered six of them to flee the clan territories. At that point, we had not yet begun to destroy ourselves."  
  
Raziel shifted his weight on his hooves. Was she trying to say something important? Or was there something else...?  
  
"The seven fled east, and as before no one chanced an encounter with them. All the way to empty Willendorf they fled, expecting Kain to strike whenever they weren't looking. Slowly their vision ceased to focus on eluding Kain and focused instead on determining whether we had a future anyway."  
  
"And so Strane sired you," Raziel said. "I know this."  
  
"But the disease-inheritance followed us." Her voice quickened. "We grew more powerful, more quickly. All that... scattered divinity, flooding into us."  
  
"Enough!" Raziel turned toward the Pillar of Balance. He noted that the yellow-white Soul Reaver burned in sympathy with his own subdued rage.  
  
"Wait, Raziel!"  
  
He raised the wraith blade.  
  
"WAIT!"  
  
His mind bent as the word echoed through space, through the wraith blade that flared as he stumbled backward, through centuries of time.   
  
********************************************************  
  
"Wait!"  
  
Morek dodged behind a hall corner, letting loose a stream of agitated babble when he fell to the floor. The third toe growing from the middle of his right hoof made him too awkward, but his pursuer had only the right mutations.   
  
"Morek! Morek!" A furious whisper, then an outstretched arm pulling him into a ruined doorway.   
  
"Get off me! Get off me!"  
  
"Shush, you fool!" Someone's hand in the dark closed over Morek's mouth until the young vampire grew calmer. "Who is it? What did you see?"  
  
"She's the one," Morek gasped. "She killed Xellan, I watched, I saw her do it."  
  
"Calm down, be still. Who is it, Helena? Why-"  
  
"No, no, no..." Morek turned his face against the stone and half-sobbed.  
  
The other did not reply for a moment. "Not Ishtar."  
  
A half-squeak escaped him. "Ishtar, she's going through the halls now, she's hunting us-"  
  
"No. She would not."  
  
"It is her!"  
  
"Quiet. I will speak to her." The other vampire left the doorway and stepped into the light. Morek huddled against the ruined wall of Willendorf Castle, a soft whimper in his throat. Maybe he had been wrong, maybe Strane would prove him wrong. It was too late to run in any case, because Ishtar emerged from behind the corner.  
  
Morek's break caught in his throat. She was terrible, powerful, even though the changes had not been too extreme. A mane of dark blue hair swirled at her shoulders, and her talons were longer, the claw slightly separate from the rest of her finger and wickedly sharp. The only other thing to set her apart was her eyes: pure black against her pale vampire's skin, without color. He hunched closer to the wall.  
  
"Oh." She stopped walking and bowed to the vampire. "My lord Strane."  
  
"My child." Strane's hands moved to her shoulders, which were not covered by the vest she wore. "I feared you had been lost."  
  
"No, my lord." Ishtar lifted her black eyes to meet his. "Don't fear for me."  
  
"I do not know who would do this." He shook his head. "We must leave. Only three of us remain... and this murderer."  
  
"Who remains?"  
  
"You, myself, and Morek. Just now he watched Xellan die." He shook his head again. "Terrible. Did you see?"  
  
Ishtar swallowed. "No, my lord."  
  
"Mm, I am glad. They could have seen you." Strane turned to face the doorway. "Morek, come. We must leave."  
  
Morek buried his face in his arms, so he did not see the quick slash that ended it. His head snapped up and Ishtar held her sire's body, which pumped blood down his chest and to the floor. A fan-spray of crimson began to drip down the walls. When he looked at Strane's body, he saw that the head had almost been severed.   
  
Ishtar dropped the crude dagger. "Forgive me." She eased the body to the ground, slowly turning him over so he lay on his back. Strane's golden eyes stared glazed at the ceiling- it was hard to tell if he had known what was coming in the last instant of his life. The bloody vampire looked regretfully over her sire's corpse. Then the expression faded and she bent over him, her mouth closing over his.  
  
Morek's eyes widened at the debauchery, but quickly he realized that something much deeper was happening. Ishtar's black eyes closed and she seemed to suck something in. The change was imperceptible, than slow, than picked up speed. Her face contorted as the flesh of her back rippled, trembling, new growth pushing its way through. She let go of her mouth's grip and screamed, blue hair falling all around her. Tension broke, flesh burst, and blood-covered limbs tore loose, shining wet and new from her back. She rocked back on her heels, the change so rough that her lungs drew in breath, as her new wings hesitantly waved behind her.  
  
Ishtar's eyes opened. Already she had recovered. She stood up from her work, seeming to emerge from a bloody cocoon as a dark goddess.  
  
Morek sprang up and rushed toward the exit at the other end of the dark room. Maybe she would still be weak or awkward. It was his only chance.  
  
Looking backward, he saw her shadow outlined in the doorway.  
  
********************************************************  
  
The ground came back into view. Raziel stumbled again, regained his balance. He had seen it in the space of an instant. He turned, his head throbbing, and saw Ishtar, wings at rest, the dark goddess in her final form.  
  
He touched a claw to his head and let it fall again.  
  
"We grew more powerful," Ishtar repeated, her words slow and heavy. "But only I was untouched by the madness. I saw them... in time, killing themselves, me. And we should not have survived, if we would die the same death as if we had stayed."  
  
Raziel could only stare at her. "You killed them all."  
  
She lowered her head, and as it had so long ago, her dark blue mane fell about her face. "It was the better thing, the good thing, the best thing. I... was the only fledgeling after the Fall. I was the only one born with a touch of... the plague, the God, already in me. It could not harm me. It annihilated all the clan except me."  
  
Ishtar raised her head. The blue fire grew brighter in her eyes. "I took from them what I saw you would need. I took the piece of the Younger that each one had, and so it multiplied inside me."  
  
Raziel clipped his words; he would have lost control if he did not. "And Turel?"  
  
"Turel... after Willendorf, I came to his territory. The remnants of our clan stationed themselves there, finding no purpose in their madness save to destroy those who were not afflicted. I gathered their power, and when all was done... I arranged that Turel would find me."  
  
The soul reaver let out a strangled chuckle. "Did he seize your eyes, or did you spare him the effort?"  
  
Ishtar shook her head. "My... ah... a Razielim did that to me."  
  
Raziel made the strange half-laugh again, paced in a random direction, finally stopped and looked at her. "You." The wraith blade burst into a dull, bristling roar. "Language has yet to fabricate a word for you. To name yourself a fledgeling of mine-" His white eyes seemed almost on fire. Ishtar's wings sank toward her back. "-but to be- what shall we call you? Kinslayer? Betrayer?"  
  
"Fratricide."  
  
The word rang between them, and the wraith blade died on Raziel's arm. A fair name, for the both of them. Gods, he was tired of all these justified wrongs. Ishtar, not Kain, had destroyed his clan, or destroyed what the plague had left untouched. Yet he could not be angry at her, because it was for him. He could not be angry at anyone, for everything was done for his sake. Perhaps, if she had told him- but no, he would not have come with her this far.  
  
And another knowing voice whispered in his mind- of *her* sacrifice, *her* life spent in the shadow of forever seeing her own death, *her* relentless pursuit of an uncertain future. Suddenly the world was far too ambiguous for his liking.  
  
Raziel shook his head, even though he knew the thoughts would not clear. "Why have you related this to me now?"  
  
"So you know... so you remember." Ishtar toyed with the decorative staff she was still holding. "Soon after the Pillar of Balance is destroyed, the fabric of the world changes. The most fundamental forces are altered- even time. Past that point, I can see nothing."  
  
Raziel turned his eyes to the Pillar of Balance. It was the last goal, the final gateway. There was nothing from here but a plunge into darkness.  
  
He shut his eyes, just for a moment. "Thank you."  
  
Ishtar did not reply, for at that moment the ninth pillar shuddered so the walls all around them trembled. The vampire and the once-vampire backed away, watching as the pillar, once tilted, slowly righted itself. A light emanated from within the stone, growing more brilliant until its green shade was consumed by pure white. With a final groan it burst upward and downward at the same time, crashing through the roof and burrowing deep beneath the earth. Then all was still, and a new pillar of white and gold stood before them. After an untold length of time, the Pillars of Nosgoth had been restored.  
  
And that could mean only one thing.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Kain lowered the axes, his ancient eyes sharpening as the battle lust faded. The vampires weren't losing, if one went by how many on each side had fallen. Yet it looked as if they were, if only because their numbers were finite while an endless stream of their enemies poured from the Abyss. The tide had slackened for now. Near the door leading to the warp gate, the last remaining Dumahim wiped their weapons clean. Their armor was stained with at least ten shades each of blue and green.  
  
Perverted creatures. But they still knew how to fight.  
  
"Lord Kain..."  
  
He turned, his blood red colors swirling unnoticed behind him. The words were spoken by Rahab's firstborn. Dachlin was not as strong as his sire had been, but he was still impressive; the amount of damage needed to show him down had to be massive, and so it was. The Rahabim's claws, stained both blue and red, held shreds of the torn webbing that had connected them. Gouges lined his body like tiger stripes, and his red eyes were impossible to see in the blood splashed over his shark-like face.  
  
Kain nodded to him. "The Elder has been unkind."  
  
"But so... have we." Dachlin pulled himself forward, his tail flopping weakly in the blood trail he left on the stone, before giving up, lying flat on the ground. "Not many... come forth. Their numbers... thin."  
  
"Then you have done well."  
  
Dachlin's glowing red eyes slowly blinked. "Thank you... my lord..." They widened again slightly. "My sire... said... we would make... the empire... proud..." His eyes closed, and the warrior's maimed body lay still.  
  
Loyal and orderly to the last, Kain thought. Ridiculously so.  
  
Some of the Dumahim flinched as the Emperor of Nosgoth turned toward them. Ah, small pleasures.  
  
"You'll follow his example, won't you?" Kain said, tapping Dachlin's head with the flat width of one axe.  
  
Several Dumahim simply stared. One bowed.  
  
Kain smirked appreciatively and turned away. No doubt Raziel had destroyed eight of the pillars by now. Yet the last must still remain. Clever girl, Ishtar, clever girl. Be so kind and delay him a bit longer.  
  
The vampire lord left the Dumahim, emerging from the rock tunnel into rays of weak moonlight. His own flags waved feebly above him, the color leeched to black and gray by the night. The sounds of the five waterfalls feeding the Abyss grew louder, as did the faint sounds of struggle below. On the rim of the whirlpool, the Rahabim preyed on whatever emerged from the swirling waters.  
  
Kain walked over the crumbling bridge and stepped onto the giant rock outcropping overlooking the Lake of the Dead. The moon, low in the sky, did not shine down into the water, and he could only hear what lay below. Traitors had died here. His son died here and rose again. It was his turn.  
  
His arm reached back and he hurled Malice spinning into the darkness. He did not even hear the splash.  
  
"Come out, squid!" Still only darkness and the sound of moving water. "Come out, avenge this poor showing."  
  
The moonlit shapes of Rahabim prowling the edge of the Abyss, the movement across the lake of Dumah's banners, darkness and moving water.  
  
The earth groaning, the heavy rasp that was the sound of a leviathan breathing. All movement stopped for the entrance of the beast. Something vast glistened below, slick and undefined in the darkness. The stone at his hooves shuddered as if all the earth's water were rising up to meet him, and when the impossibly large bulk of the Elder rose from the depths, he could have believed it. Each tentacle was too wide, too long, to distinguish from the others. He could not even see if the thing had eyes, or if it did, where they were- its bulk was too colossal to pick out something so insignificant. It rose dripping water and settled on the opposite cliff, the one that led to Dumah's territory. Moonlight dabbed it with horrific glowing tones, as if a titanic mass of shadow and silhouetted tentacles were not enough.  
  
Kain forced a smile and mock-bowed. "Truly, your kindness exceeds all bounds."  
  
No eyes turned toward him, but he felt the weight of its gaze brimming with dark power and the primal force of the fundamental elements. "Your arrogance exceeds all bounds." Its voice shook in the air between them.  
  
"You do me wrong."  
  
The Elder's voice rumbled wordlessly somewhere in its massive bulk. It seemed as if the waterfalls answered, their roars suddenly angry and vengeful. "This decaying world will be thankful for it." Sinuous shadows rose into the air, arching over the Abyss and waving high over Kain's head. He knew he had no chance.  
  
The Emperor of Nosgoth raised Havoc in a salute, a wry smile crossing his face. It had been interesting. He would need something new to mark the last battle. Luckily, he had prepared.  
  
"Morituri te salutamus!"  
  
And Kain, Balance Guardian and vampire lord, leapt into the battle he had always known he could not win.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Ishtar lowered her head. So Kain had been slain at last, but she did not have the heart to see his demise. Better to imagine that he showed as much bland enthusiasm at his end as before. She did not know the proper way to die in this case- to impart some earnest message at her end, or to simply pass along, having done her part.  
  
Raziel stepped onto the remains of Kain's throne, which had splintered apart when the pillar was renewed. His wings blocked her view of his face.  
  
"You should consume it quickly," she said.  
  
"Yes." He lowered one wing to meet her gaze. "There is no more time."  
  
Ishtar turned away. She paid no attention to the consuming of the pillar behind her, because by now she had the scene memorized. The pillar turned to light, more glowing than glaring, and flowed into Raziel's eyes and mouth as if pouring through a funnel. It passed right through the cowl covering his face and glowed from behind it before vanishing somewhere inside him. Then a dark splinter, the soul of the guardian that had not yet had time to merge completely with the pillar- it broke off and floated free for a moment. As if making a decision, it plunged into the wraith blade. She couldn't tell if Raziel noticed.  
  
The soul reaver fell to one knee from the impact, but quickly regained his feet. His symbiotic weapon now ran black and red over his skin. That and his black wings made him look the part of a Dark God, a savior who had descended to hell and returned to divinity on the other side.  
  
"There..." Raziel said. "There."  
  
Ishtar gazed at the raised platform they stood on. All nine pillars had been destroyed, and the Sanctuary had nothing to show that it was not abandoned. The clan banners had faded... the throne had shattered. There was nothing there.  
  
Her talons squeezed the staff in her grip, Kain's parting gift. She could not falter now.  
  
"Now all tasks have been performed." Raziel raised the new Soul Reaver experimentally. "Save one."  
  
"No, Raziel." Her wings, kept rigidly straight, betrayed nothing. "There is one more... but not for you."  
  
His hairless eyebrows furrowed.  
  
"As you are," she said, "you cannot defeat the Elder." She paused. "Do you understand?"  
  
Raziel slowly tilted his head. "What riddles are you weaving now?"  
  
Ishtar shut her eyelids. "You will understand, father."  
  
He did not comprehend when she gripped the staff in both hands. An instant later he did, or a flash of seeing in time showed him what she intended. He sprang at her, a blur of blue, black, and red, but it was too late.  
  
"Ishtar..."  
  
Ishtar fell to her knees. The staff had struck true, through her chest and out her back. He would not have to finish her after all... Dimly she registered that her fingers, still gripping the staff, were turning wet.  
  
Ah, Turel, you have had your vengeance after all.  
  
Raziel was in front of her, his white eyes larger than she had ever seen them. "Why?! My *child*..." His claws touched the staff protruding from her chest.  
  
"Leave it. Had to be... I..." It was quickly becoming difficult to speak. "...only one... could harbor... the gift."  
  
She saw Raziel, days ago, pulling a tomato plant from the ground.  
  
"Knew... pillars... not enough." Raziel's claws in her hair.  
  
"Could... c-c-c-c..."  
  
She saw herself, turning flames into stone.  
  
"Needed... to give you... more."  
  
Raziel regaining his wings.  
  
"Killed... every... one... give you... all of it."  
  
The vision blurred. It was Kain, holding two bloody axes, walking up the bridge to the Abyss.  
  
"All... the God... I could." Ishtar forced herself to swallow. "Take... it... all...."  
  
Blindness fell over her. Raziel pulled her against him, saying nothing, his forehead against her skull. He had to understand, she had to know if he did. She opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue could not move. Her entire body felt limp and empty.  
  
Ishtar lay still. Everything faded. Regret, the stone under her body, memory, the blood falling from somewhere. The lights dimmed, the cast took their final bows-  
  
A last spark of the sight flared up. She saw his wings, black, scaly, muscular, a mirror of her own, curled around her and catching the blood that would have fallen to the floor. She had known them, once. They had haunted her.  
  
But they were too distant now. She watched them float past her mind, blank, a vision of neither horror nor sorrow.  
  
Then it passed completely, and with a final bow, Ishtar left the stage.  
  
********************************************************  
  
Raziel was everywhere, and everwhere he saw mourning. His sight expanded outward and glimpsed the patterns that made up the universe, all of which rippled with Ishtar's death. Yet he was part of her mind, that part of her that rejoiced she had shown no weakness at the end. All the shards of godhood she had gathered from so many Razielim found their way into his being. She was part of him, every layer of consciousness and each one's perceptions. Even his new form resembled hers, but it was greater- it marked the true heir of the Younger God, when she had been a regent.  
  
He left the Sanctuary of the Clans. He passed through the tunnel that led to the Abyss, unraveling with a thought the single Sluagh that appeared. Bodies, blood, and ashes marked his way. He passed between Kain's faded banners, over the rotting plank bridge, and stopped at the cliff where he had been executed. A closing of his eyes, and blue fire burst into being over his head. It was an oroborus, his symbol, the Younger's symbol, Ishtar's symbol, in which the end was the beginning.  
  
At the other end of the Abyss, the Elder awaited him. Raziel felt no hatred- he had left that behind with Ishtar's body.  
  
He wondered, suddenly, if he could have killed her.  
  
The other Dark God rearer itself up so moonlight found the tip of its body. It was even more massive than it had appeared in the underworld. Raziel walked to the edge of the precipice. He bore the staff that had killed his daughter, that bore the symbol of the clan he had birthed, the clan he had sacrificed.  
  
"Elder." The stone shook with his voice.  
  
Tentacles slid against each other in the darkness.  
  
"Raziel." The waters shook with his.  
  
"Shall we end this?"  
  
"We shall."  
  
The mountains trembled, the waters thundered, and for the first time in millennia the Dark Gods went to war. 


	16. Epilogue: Slouching Toward Bethlehem

*makes final bow to the reviewers* Thank you, thank you, especially to the Four Horsewomen of Eloquence- Amuseme, Lilith/Nocturnally-Damned, VladimirsAngel, and Silmuen. In the beginning I wrote the story for myself, towards the end I wrote it for you. :) Thanks for joining me on the ride.  
  
Epilogue- Slouching Toward Bethlehem  
  
The old woman stared at the treetops, remembering the past. By all rights, she should have died decades ago- that was a very common thought and by now it had lost its shine, as did all things when time was winding down. She was glad, though. It was hard not to be on such an inoffensively mild day. The world had once been less forgiving...  
  
"Mother?"  
  
Katalina started. "Oh... oh, my apologies."  
  
Benjamin smiled. "You were drifting again."  
  
She waved her hand dismissively. "Old memories, you know."  
  
Her son nodded, and they both turned their heads to watch the children. The forest was dappled with light and a breeze rattled the leaves, creating the perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek. She saw little Angeline between the tree trunks, her nose scrunched up and her mouth delivering some sort of protest. Paul was nowhere to be found. They were fine grandchildren, even if she had once thought she would have more of them.  
  
Katalina shifted her weight in the wooden chair, winced as her lazy body barely complied. "Benjamin, do you remember the citadel?"  
  
His face darkened. "Of course I do."  
  
"Did you like it there?"  
  
"Well." Benjamin brushed his thumb along the underside of his jaw, where a tiny crop of stubble was growing. "I suppose it was an easier life, in a way. Yet... I'm glad Paul and Angeline don't have to live there." He caught Angeline's eye and smiled at her. "It's... good to live outside the walls."  
  
"Yes, that's certainly true." She wished her eyes were as sharp as they used to be. The bird on the branch above her head looked like a robin, but she couldn't be sure. "And to have sunlight."  
  
"And trees." He smiled to himself. "I don't think I saw a single tree in the citadel, the whole time I lived there."  
  
"Well, that's because you didn't come by enough. I grew apple trees, you know... huge things. The sweetest apples. You won't find those anymore."  
  
"Maybe you can grow a patch in a clearing somewhere. We might find it again, if we come back."  
  
"No..." Katalina sighed. "It's not the same, life's not the same. You need to be there to grow something... make it thrive. People don't stay in the same place anymore."  
  
"We can't."  
  
"Yes... I know."  
  
They sat in silence, and both of them started when the branches above them rattled. For an instant she convinced herself it was black wings blocking the sunlight- no. Only the robin, leaping into the air and flying away.  
  
Katalina slowly shook her head. She felt tired. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't keep... bringing up your brother and sister..."  
  
"It's alright." Benjamin leaned forward in his chair and patted her hand. "I miss them too."  
  
A shrill voice interrupted them. "Dada! Look what I found! Lookit!" Paul tumbled out of the woods, his cheeks streaked with dirt. He smiled gleefully as he ran toward them, his prize bouncing along at his side.  
  
"Heyyy, let's see what you've got there." Benjamin tilted obligingly as Paul climbed into his lap. "Where'd you find that?"  
  
"On a tree!" The boy plopped his discovery on his lap triumphantly.  
  
"Wait..." Katalina leaned forward with sudden interest. "Now let me see that..."  
  
Paul handed it over, only too happy to watch the adults marvel at his treasure. Her hands accepted it gingerly, gently turning the round object over. Dirt caked the surface, though she could make out that it was a sphere tied with a chain so it could be hung from above.  
  
Something in her mind flashed with recognition. Hesitantly, she scratched some of the dirt away with her fingernail, then more. It fell onto her lap unnoticed.   
  
"Well?" Benjamin said. "What is it?"  
  
Her tongue caught in her mouth as light spilled from the hole she had made, light filtered through glass tinted blue. "Paul... has your father told you about glyph-globes?"  
  
"Noooo," Paul half-sang.  
  
Katalina looked from the globe to him. "We used them to farm once. Back when the furnaces were tended." She looked back down at the object in her lap. "...and the vampires only came out at night..."  
  
"Paulllll!" Angeline appeared from the brush, panting furiously. "You can't do that!"  
  
Paul hopped off his father's lap, the glyph-globe forgotten. "Can too!"  
  
"Can not!"  
  
"I called a time-out!" He hopped over to his sister, and Katalina locked eyes with Benjamin.  
  
"That's incredible!" He scratched behind his ear, not long enough to relieve an itch. "Someone must have been carrying that around for... twenty years, at least."  
  
"Yes..." Her thumb covered the hole she made in the dirt, trapping the light inside. The glass underneath was warm. "I don't know how it could survive so long, out here."  
  
Benjamin nodded, a slight frown on his face. "Especially hung on a tree."  
  
Katalina lowered the globe to the ground by its chain and absently brushed the dirt off her lap. She didn't know why this would remind her of it... but an image came to her mind, something she had not thought of for years. A certain bizarre creature, an unheralded savior of the citadel once- blue, wasn't he? Missing most of his torso... what had happened to him?  
  
"I don't know," she said aloud. "We'll never know..."  
  
Angeline ran past them, closely followed by Paul. It made her smile weakly.  
  
He looked so much like his father.  
  
-End- 


End file.
